Degeneracy between Lensing and Occultation in the Analysis of Self-lensing Phenomena

Abstract

More than 40 years after the first discussion, it was recently reported the detection of a self-lensing phenomenon within a binary system where the brightness of a background star is magnified by its foreground companion. It is expected that the number of self-lensing binary detections will be increased in a wealth of data from current and future survey experiments. In this paper, we introduce a degeneracy in the interpretation of self-lensing light curves. The degeneracy is intrinsic to self-lensing binaries for which both magnification by lensing and de-magnification by occultation occur simultaneously and is caused by the difficulty in separating the contribution of the lensing-induced magnification from the observed light curve. We demonstrate the severity of the degeneracy by presenting example self-lensing light curves suffering from the degeneracy. We also present the relation between the lensing parameters of the degenerate solutions. The degeneracy would pose as an important obstacle in accurately determine self-lensing parameters and thus to characterize binaries.