Abstract
Abstract We report the discovery of a planet-mass companion to the microlens OGLE-2016-BLG-0263L. Unlike most low-mass companions that were detected through perturbations to the smooth and symmetric light curves produced by the primary, the companion was discovered through the channel of a repeating event, in which the companion itself produced its own single-mass light curve after the event produced by the primary had ended. Thanks to the continuous coverage of the second peak by high-cadence surveys, the possibility of the repeating nature due to source binarity is excluded with a 96% confidence level. The mass of the companion estimated by a Bayesian analysis is . The projected primary-companion separation is au. The ratio of the separation to the snow-line distance of corresponds to the region beyond Neptune, the outermost planet of the solar system. We discuss the importance of high-cadence surveys in expanding the range of microlensing detections of low-mass companions and future space-based microlensing surveys.
Highlights
A microlensing signal of a very low-mass companion such as a planet is usually a brief perturbation to the smooth andThe Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) Collaboration
By entering the fourth phase survey experiment, the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) group substantially increased the observational cadence by broadening the field of view (FOV) of their camera from 0.4 deg2 to 1.4 deg2 (Udalski et al 2015)
The scientific importance of the repeating-event channel is that the range of planets and brown dwarfs (BDs) detectable by microlensing is expanded
Summary
A microlensing signal of a very low-mass companion such as a planet is usually a brief perturbation to the smooth and. One very important merit of high-cadence microlensing surveys is the increased rate of detecting very low-mass companions. High-cadence surveys are capable of continuously and densely sampling the light curves of all microlensing events, and the rate of detecting very lowmass companions is expected to be greatly increased. Another important advantage of high-cadence surveys is that they open an additional channel of detecting very low-mass companions. High-cadence surveys are able to densely monitor events during the lensing magnification and before and after it, and this allows low-mass companions to be detected via the “repeating-event” channel.
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