Population Study of Astrophysical False Positive Detections in the Southern PLATO field

Abstract

For the upcoming PLAnetary Transits and Oscillation of stars (PLATO) satellite mission, a large number of target stars are required to yield a statistically significant number of planet transits. Locating the centres of the long duration observational phase (LOP) fields closer to the Galactic plane will increase the target star numbers but also the astrophysical false positives (FPs) from blended eclipsing binary systems. We utilise the Binary Stellar Evolution and Population Synthesis (BiSEPS) code, to create a complete synthetic stellar and planetary population for the proposed southern LOP field (LOPS0), as well as for a representative portion of the northern LOP field (LOPNsub). For LOPS0 we find an overall low FP rate for planets smaller than Neptunes. The FP rate generally shows little variation with Galactic longitude (l), and a modest increase with decreasing Galactic latitude (|b|). The location of the LOPS field centre within the current allowed region is not strongly constrained by FPs. Analysis of LOPNsub suggests a markedly increased number of FPs across the full range of planet radii at low |b| resulting in approximately twice the percent FP rate in the LOPNsub compared to the corresponding southern field segment in the planet radius range -0.2 < log(R/Rsun) <= 0.4. However, only a few percent of fully eclipsing FPs in LOPS0 in this radius range have periods

17 pages, 23 figures, 9 tables. Accepted for publication in MNRAS

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Cited by in corpus (3)

• The PLATO field selection process. II. Characterization of LOPS2, the first long-pointing field
• PLATOSpec: a precise spectrograph in support of space missions
• Detecting false positives with PLATO using double-aperture photometry and centroid shifts