Investigating the potential of the Pan-Planets project using Monte Carlo simulations

TL;DR

This study uses Monte Carlo simulations to evaluate the Pan-Planets transit survey's potential, demonstrating its competitiveness and predicting the discovery of various exoplanets within the first two years.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed simulation framework for optimizing the Pan-Planets survey and predicts its exoplanet detection capabilities based on realistic noise and light curve modeling.

Findings

Up to 25 Jupiter-sized planets expected in first year

Sensitivity to longer period and smaller radius planets

Survey's competitive edge due to large field of view

Abstract

Using Monte Carlo simulations we analyze the potential of the upcoming transit survey Pan-Planets. The analysis covers the simulation of realistic light curves (including the effects of ingress/egress and limb-darkening) with both correlated and uncorrelated noise as well as the application of a box-fitting-least-squares detection algorithm. In this work we show how simulations can be a powerful tool in defining and optimizing the survey strategy of a transiting planet survey. We find the Pan-Planets project to be competitive with all other existing and planned transit surveys with the main power being the large 7 square degree field of view. In the first year we expect to find up to 25 Jupiter-sized planets with periods below 5 days around stars brighter than V = 16.5 mag. The survey will also be sensitive to planets with longer periods and planets with smaller radii. After the second year of the survey, we expect to find up to 9 Warm Jupiters with periods between 5 and 9 days and 7 Very Hot Saturns around stars brighter than V = 16.5 mag as well as 9 Very Hot Neptunes with periods from 1 to 3 days around stars brighter than i' = 18.0 mag.