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arXiv · 2211.13393

Simulations of Triple Microlensing Events I: Detectability of a scaled Sun-Jupiter-Saturn System

Abstract

Up to date, only 13 firmly established triple microlensing events have been discovered, so the occurrence rates of microlensing two-planet systems and planets in binary systems are still uncertain. With the upcoming space-based microlensing surveys, hundreds of triple microlensing events will be detected. To provide clues for future observations and statistical analyses, we initiate a project to investigate the detectability of triple-lens systems with different configurations and observational setups. As the first step, in this work we develop the simulation software and investigate the detectability of a scaled Sun-Jupiter-Saturn system with the recently proposed telescope for microlensing observation on the ``Earth 2.0 (ET)'' satellite. With the same $Δχ^2$ thresholds of detecting a single planet and two planets, we find that the detectability of the scaled Sun-Jupiter-Saturn analog is about 1% and the presence of the Jovian planet suppresses the detectability of the Saturn-like planet by $\sim $13% regardless of the adopted detection $Δχ^2$ threshold. This suppression probability could be at the same level as the Poisson noise of future space-based statistical samples of triple-lenses, so it is inappropriate to treat each planet separately during detection efficiency calculations.

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Renkun Kuang, Weicheng Zang, Shude Mao, Jiyuan Zhang, Haochang Jiang. 2023-02-07. Simulations of Triple Microlensing Events I: Detectability of a scaled Sun-Jupiter-Saturn System. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras%2Fstad461

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