Tootfinder

Trump’s White House budget chief, Russ Vought,
just ominously posted on X that
“reductions in force”
(laying off federal workers)
have begun, as the government shutdown enters its 10th day.
He offered no further details, but we’ll bring you more as soon as we get it.

Binary-lens Microlensing Degeneracy: Impact on Planetary Sensitivity and Mass-ratio Function
Yuxin Shang, Hongjing Yang, Jiyuan Zhang, Shude Mao, Andrew Gould, Weicheng Zang, Qiyue Qian, Jennifer C. Yee
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16191

Binary-lens Microlensing Degeneracy: Impact on Planetary Sensitivity and Mass-ratio Function
Gravitational microlensing is a unique method for discovering cold planets across a broad mass range. Reliable statistics of the microlensing planets require accurate sensitivity estimates. However, the impact of the degeneracies in binary-lens single-source (2L1S) models that affect many actual planet detections is often omitted in sensitivity estimates, leading to potential self-inconsistency of the statistics studies. In this work, we evaluate the effect of the 2L1S degeneracies on planetary…