On the Feasibility of Detecting Satellites of Extrasolar Planets via Microlensing

Abstract

Although many methods of detecting extra-solar planets have been proposed and successful implementation of some of these methods enabled a rapidly increasing number of exoplanet detections, little has been discussed about the method of detecting satellites around exoplanets. In this paper, we test the feasibility of detecting satellites of exoplanets via microlensing. For this purpose, we investigate the effect of satellites in the magnification pattern near the region of the planet-induced perturbations by performing realistic simulations of Galactic bulge microlensing events. From this investigation, we find that although satellites can often cause alterations of magnification patterns, detecting satellite signals in lensing light curves will be very difficult because the signals are seriously smeared out by the severe finite source effect even for events involved with source stars with small angular radii.