Keele Research Repository

We report the discovery of a cold Super-Earth planet (m(p) = 4.4 +/- 0.5 M-circle plus) orbiting a low-mass (M = 0.23 +/- 0.03 M-circle dot) M dwarf at projected separation a(perpendicular to) l = 1.18 +/- 0.10 a.u., i.e., about 1.9 times the distance the snow line. The system is quite nearby for a microlensing planet, D-L = 0.86 +/- 0.09 kpc. Indeed, it was the large lens-source relative parallax pi(rel) = 1.0 mas (combined with the low mass M) that gave rise to the large, and thus well-measured, "microlens parallax" pi(E) proportional to (pi(rel)/M)(1)(/2) that enabled these precise measurements. OGLE-2017-BLG-1434Lb is the eighth microlensing planet with planet-host mass ratio q < 1 x 10(-4).

We apply a new planet-detection sensitivity method, which is a variant of "V/V-max", to seven of these eight planets to derive the mass-ratio function in this regime. We find dN/ d lnq proportional to q(P) , with p =1.05(-0.68)(+0.78), which confirms the "turnover" in the mass function found by Suzuki et al. relative to the power law of opposite sign n = -0.93 +/- 0.13 at higher mass ratios q greater than or similar to 2 x 10(-4). We combine our result with that of Suzuki et al. to obtain p = 0.73(-0.34)(+0.42.)