Testing the Rate of False Planetary Transits due to Binary Star Blending

Abstract

We investigate the rate of false planetary transit detection due to blending with eclipsing binaries. Our approach is purely empirical and is based on the analysis of the artificially blended light curves of the eclipsing binary stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud from the archive of the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE). Employing parameters that characterize the significance of the transit and the amplitude of the variation out of the transit, we can substantially limit the number of potential false positives. Further constraint comes from the expected length of the transit by a possible planetary companion. By the application of these criteria we are left only with 18 candidates from the full sample of 2495 stars. Visual inspection of these remaining variables eliminates all of them for obvious reasons (e.g., for visible fingerprints of orbital eccentricity). We draw the attention to the short-period stars, where the false alarm rate is especially low.