Related papers: Kepler-16: A Transiting Circumbinary Planet
Most Sun-like stars in the Galaxy reside in gravitationally-bound pairs of stars called "binary stars". While long anticipated, the existence of a "circumbinary planet" orbiting such a pair of normal stars was not definitively established…
We report the detection of Kepler-47, a system consisting of two planets orbiting around an eclipsing pair of stars. The inner and outer planets have radii 3.0 and 4.6 times that of the Earth, respectively. The binary star consists of a…
Kepler-16 is an eccentric low-mass eclipsing binary with a circumbinary transiting planet. Here we investigate the angular momentum of the primary star, based on Kepler photometry and Keck spectroscopy. The primary star's rotation period is…
When an extrasolar planet passes in front of its star (transits), its radius can be measured from the decrease in starlight and its orbital period from the time between transits. Multiple planets transiting the same star reveal more: period…
The recent discovery of a number of circumbinary planets lends a new tool to astrophysicists seeking to understand how and where planet formation takes place. Of the increasingly numerous circumbinary systems, Kepler-16 is arguably the most…
Transit times around single stars can be described well by a linear ephemeris. However, transit times in circumbinary systems are influenced both by the gravitational perturbations and the orbital phase variations of the central binary…
Since the discovery of the first extrasolar giant planets around Sun-like stars, evolving observational capabilities have brought us closer to the detection of true Earth analogues. The size of an exoplanet can be determined when it…
We report the detection of three transiting planets around a Sunlike star, which we designate Kepler-18. The transit signals were detected in photometric data from the Kepler satellite, and were confirmed to arise from planets using a…
We discuss the discovery and characterization of the circumbinary planet Kepler-38b. The stellar binary is single-lined, with a period of 18.8 days, and consists of a moderately evolved main-sequence star (M_A = 0.949 +/- 0.059 solar masses…
The Kepler-11 planetary system contains six transiting planets ranging in size from 1.8 to 4.2 times the radius of Earth. Five of these planets orbit in a tightly-packed configuration with periods between 10 and 47 days. We perform a…
In the Solar system the planets' compositions vary with orbital distance, with rocky planets in close orbits and lower-density gas giants in wider orbits. The detection of close-in giant planets around other stars was the first clue that…
We report the discovery of a Neptune-size (R_p = 3.87 +/- 0.06 R_Earth) transiting circumbinary planet, Kepler-1661 b, found in the Kepler photometry. The planet has a period of ~175 days and its orbit precesses with a period of only 35…
The recently discovered circumbinary planets (Kepler-16 b, Kepler-34 b, Kepler-35 b) represent the first direct evidence of the viability of planet formation in circumbinary orbits. We report on the results of N-body simulations…
We present 44 days of high duty cycle, ultra precise photometry of the 13th magnitude star Kepler-5 (KIC 8191672, Teff=6300 K, logg=4.1), which exhibits periodic transits with a depth of 0.7%. Detailed modeling of the transit is consistent…
Kepler-444 is a five planet system around a host-star approximately 11 billion years old. The five transiting planets all have sub-Earth radii and are in a compact configuration with orbital periods between 3 and 10 days. Here we present a…
Circumbinary planets are generally more likely to transit than equivalent single-star planets, but practically the geometry and orbital dynamics of circumbinary planets make the chance of observing a transit inherently time-dependent. In…
We report the discovery of a new Kepler transiting circumbinary planet (CBP). This latest addition to the still-small family of CBPs defies the current trend of known short-period planets orbiting near the stability limit of binary stars.…
We report the discovery and confirmation of a transiting circumbinary planet (PH1b) around KIC 4862625, an eclipsing binary in the Kepler field. The planet was discovered by volunteers searching the first six Quarters of publicly available…
While the vast majority of multiple-planet systems have their orbital angular momentum axes aligned with the spin axis of their host star, Kepler-56 is an exception: its two transiting planets are coplanar yet misaligned by at least 40…
The vast majority of well studied giant-planet systems, including the Solar System, are nearly coplanar which implies dissipation within a primordial gas disk. however, intrinsic instability may lead to planet-planet scattering, which often…