Cool Stars 14 - Submitted Abstract # 131
This version created on 05 October 2006

Detecting Transiting Planets and Low-Mass Eclipsing Binaries with
Pan-STARRS-1


Trent J. Dupuy, Institute for Astronomy - Univ. of Hawai`i
Michael C. Liu, Institute for Astronomy - Univ. of Hawai`i

There is a class of eclipsing systems for which the optimal search
mode is a survey where the transit is observed infrequently compared
to the total number of observations:  very deep eclipsing systems.
The upcoming Pan-STARRS 3-Pi Survey will image 75% of the whole sky in
the optical 60  times over 3 years, opening the door to detection of
these valuable, but rare, events without being limited by the poorly
sampled light curves it will generate.  Furthermore, the 3-Pi Survey
will produce parallax measurements of all stars out to ~100  pc, which
is a major advantage to a transit search because a volume-limited
sample contains fewer contaminating variable sources than a
flux-limited sample.  Since low-mass stars dominate a volume-limited
sample, two important classes of deep-eclipsing systems detectable by
the 3-Pi Survey are:  transiting planet- to substellar-mass companions
of M dwarfs (~10% flux dip);  and substellar eclipsing binaries in
which both components are the same size by virtue of the flat
substellar mass-radius relation (~50-100% dip in the optical).  We
present results from a simulation of the 3-Pi Survey in which we find
that the most likely hosts of detectable planetary transits are M
dwarfs, and we discuss sources of false positives due to largely
unknown M dwarf variability.  We also present results of the low-mass
eclipsing binary yield of the Pan-STARRS 3-Pi Survey, which is
expected to be the other major source of false positives when
searching for planetary transit candidates.

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