PLANETARY CAUSTIC PERTURBATIONS OF A CLOSE-SEPARATION PLANET ON MICROLENSING

  • Published : 2016.04.12

Abstract

We investigate the properties and detection conditions for the planetary caustic perturbation of close-separation planets. To find the properties of the planetary caustic perturbation, we construct deviation maps by subtracting the single-lensing magnification of the lens star from the planetary lensing magnification for various lensing parameters. We find that each deviation area of the positive and negative perturbations disappears at the same normalized source radius according to a given deviation threshold regardless of mass ratio but disappears at a different normalized source radius according to the separation. We also estimate the upper limit of the normalized source radius to detect the planetary caustic perturbation. We find simple relations between the upper limit of the normalized source radius and the lensing parameters. From the relations, we obtain an analytic condition for the detection limit of the planet, and which show that we can sufficiently discover a planet with the mass of sub-Earth for typical microlensing events. Therefore, we expect to add the number of low-mass planets in the next-generation microlensing experiments and conclude that our detection condition of the planet can be used as a important criteria for maximal planet detections considering the source type and the photometric accuracy.

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