Watch a foreground star cross the line of sight to a distant background star and read the resulting light curve - scrub the event timeline, toggle a planet's secondary spike, and see the same brightness shape astronomers use to find exoplanets without ever seeing a resolved image.
Play event advances one full brightening event in about 14 seconds; pause and scrub 0 to 100 percent to hold the lens star mid-alignment while the curve below traces the exact brightness shape at that moment.
The main curve is a Paczynski-style single-lens brightening; the planet toggle adds the short secondary spike a real orbiting planet contributes to the same light curve. This is an educational approximation of the geometry and the real curve shape, not a ray-traced simulation and not a specific observed event.
Gravitational Microlensing Exoplanet 3D Explorer
Scrub the event timeline in the Gravitational Microlensing Exoplanet 3D Explorer to watch a foreground star briefly brighten a distant background star, then toggle the planet spike to see how an orbiting planet adds a short secondary bump to the same light curve.
Drag to orbit the alignment view, scroll or pinch to zoom, and press Play event to run one full brightening event end to end. The canvas below the 3D view plots brightness against time in real time as the event plays.
The facts panel lists the first microlensing exoplanet detection, typical event duration, and the surveys and upcoming telescope watching for the next ones - all published figures, none invented.
- Foreground lens star crossing the line of sight to a fixed background source star
- Live 2D brightness-vs-time light-curve plot matching the current alignment
- Planet toggle that adds a short secondary spike to the main brightening curve
- Event timeline scrub 0 to 100 percent plus Play event / Pause event
- Published detection figures in the facts panel
- Runs fully in the browser with the vendored three.js engine - no account, no upload
Astronomy students use it to connect a light curve's shape to the underlying alignment geometry, teachers use the planet toggle to show why a planetary anomaly is so much shorter than the main event, and curious readers scrub straight to the peak to see maximum brightening.
| Figure | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| First microlensing exoplanet | OGLE-2003-BLG-235 / MOA-2003-BLG-53 (2004) | OGLE and MOA survey teams |
| Typical event duration (stellar-mass lens) | about 20-40 days | OGLE / MOA published statistics |
| Planetary anomaly duration | hours to days | Scales with sqrt of planet/star mass ratio |
| Ground surveys watching for events | OGLE, MOA, KMTNet | Survey project pages |
Everything renders on your device with WebGL. The 3D engine loads once (about 0.7 MB) and is cached; no scene data is sent to a server.
The scene is an educational geometry and light-curve-shape visualization - it does not model photon noise, does not solve gravitational lensing ray optics, and is not matched to a live observation or a real photometry pipeline.
For a step-by-step walkthrough, read the Gravitational Microlensing Exoplanet 3D Explorer step-by-step guide. The Space 3D collection also includes an Exoplanet Transit 3D Explorer for the transit-dip detection method and a Kepler Orbits 3D Explorer for orbital mechanics.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does Gravitational Microlensing Exoplanet 3D Explorer show?
A foreground star crossing the line of sight to a distant background star, briefly bending and focusing its light into a smooth brightness curve - the same curve shape astronomers use to detect exoplanets around the foreground star.
Why is there no resolved image of the two stars?
The foreground and background stars are far too close together in the sky, at stellar-mass lens scale, for any telescope to resolve separate images. Microlensing is detected purely from the brightness change over time, not from an image.
What is the planet spike toggle?
It adds a short secondary brightness spike caused by a planet orbiting the lens star. In real detections that anomaly lasts hours to days, far shorter than the multi-week main event, because its duration scales with the square root of the planet-to-star mass ratio.
How is this different from Exoplanet Transit 3D Explorer?
Exoplanet Transit 3D Explorer shows a planet crossing its own star's face and dimming it. Gravitational Microlensing Exoplanet 3D Explorer is a completely different detection method - a foreground star (not the planet's own star) brightens a distant background star, and the planet's signature is a secondary spike, not a dip.
When was the first microlensing exoplanet found?
The first published microlensing exoplanet detection was OGLE-2003-BLG-235 / MOA-2003-BLG-53, announced in 2004 by the OGLE and MOA survey teams.
Is this real telescope data?
No. The scene is an educational geometry and light-curve-shape visualization with an honest approximation disclosure. It does not download real light curves, does not match a live observation, and is not a photometry pipeline or a ray-traced lensing simulation.