2009ApJ...704.1519D

We present detailed simulations of the Pan-STARRS-1 (PS1) multi-epoch, multiband 3π Survey in order to assess its potential yield of transiting planets and eclipsing binaries. This survey differs from dedicated transit surveys in that it will cover the entire northern sky but provide only sparsely sampled light curves. Since most eclipses would be detected at only a single epoch, the 3π Survey will be most sensitive to deep eclipses (≳0.10 mag) caused by Jupiters transiting M dwarfs and eclipsing stellar/substellar binaries. The survey will measure parallaxes for the ∼4x10⁵ stars within 100 pc, which will enable a volume-limited eclipse search, reducing the number of astrophysical false positives compared with previous magnitude-limited searches. Using the best available empirical data, we constructed a model of the extended solar neighborhood that includes stars, brown dwarfs, and a realistic binary population. We computed the yield of deeply eclipsing systems using both a semianalytic and a full Monte Carlo approach. We examined statistical tests for detecting single-epoch eclipses in sparsely sampled data and assessed their vulnerability to false positives due to stellar variability. Assuming a short-period planet frequency of 0.5% for M dwarfs, our simulations predict that about a dozen transiting Jupiters around low-mass stars (M_{*} < 0.3 M_☉) within 100 pc are potentially detectable in the PS1 3π Survey, along with ∼300 low-mass eclipsing binaries (both component masses <0.5 M_☉), including ∼10 eclipsing field brown dwarfs. Extensive follow-up observations would be required to characterize these candidate eclipsing systems, thereby enabling comprehensive tests of structural models and novel insights into the planetary architecture of low-mass stars.