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Identifying Transiting Circumbinary Planets

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 May 2008

Aviv Ofir*
Affiliation:
School of Physics and Astronomy, Raymond and Beverly Sackler Faculty of Exact Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel email: avivofir@wise.tau.ac.il
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Abstract

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Transiting planets manifest themselves by a periodic dimming of their host star by a fixed amount. On the other hand, light curves of transiting circumbinary (CB) planets are expected to be neither periodic nor to have a single depth while in transit, making the Box-Least-Squares (BLS) transit detection method almost ineffective. Therefore, a modified version for the identification of CB planets was developed - CB-BLS. We show that using CB-BLS it is possible to find CB planets in the residuals of light curves of eclipsing binaries (EBs) that have noise levels of 1% or more. Using CB-BLS will allow us to use the massive ground- and space-based photometric surveys to look for these objects. Detecting transiting CB planets is expected to have a wide range of implications. For instance, the frequency of CB planets depends on the planetary formation mechanism - and planets in close pairs of stars provide a most restrictive constraint on planet formation models. Furthermore, understanding very high precision light curves is limited by stellar parameters - and since for EBs the stellar parameters are much better determined, the resultant planetary structure models will have significantly smaller error bars, maybe even small enough to challenge theory.

Type
Contributed Papers
Copyright
Copyright © International Astronomical Union 2009

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