Related papers: The Transiting Circumbinary Planets Kepler-34 and …
Currently, we have only limited means to probe the presence of planets at large orbital separations. Foreman-Mackey et al. searched for long-period transiting planets in the Kepler light curves using an automated pipeline. Here, we apply…
Solar system planets move on almost circular orbits. In strong contrast, many massive gas giant exoplanets travel on highly elliptical orbits, whereas the shape of the orbits of smaller, more terrestrial, exoplanets remained largely…
We discuss the detectability of gravitationally bounded pairs of gas-giant planets (which we call "binary planets") in extrasolar planetary systems that are formed through orbital instability followed by planet-planet dynamical tides during…
Planet formation is often considered in the context of one circumstellar disk around one star. Yet stellar binary systems are ubiquitous, and thus a substantial fraction of all potential planets must form and evolve in more complex,…
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…
We analyze the effect of companion stars on the bulk density of 29 planets orbiting 15 stars in the Kepler field. These stars have at least one stellar companion within 2", and the planets have measured masses and radii, allowing an…
A handful of stars are known to host both an inner system of multiple transiting planets and an outer giant planet. These systems all feature a prominent gap between the orbits of two of the transiting planets, distinguishing them from…
We report on the masses, sizes, and orbits of the planets orbiting 22 Kepler stars. There are 49 planet candidates around these stars, including 42 detected through transits and 7 revealed by precise Doppler measurements of the host stars.…
As of today ten circumbinary planets orbiting solar type main sequence stars have been discovered. Nearly all of them orbit around the central binary very closely to the region of instability where it is difficult to form them in situ. It…
Transits on single stars are rare. The probability rarely exceeds a few per cent. Furthermore, this probability rapidly approaches zero at increasing orbital period. Therefore transit surveys have been predominantly limited to the inner…
We report on the orbital architectures of Kepler systems having multiple planet candidates identified in the analysis of data from the first six quarters of Kepler data and reported by Batalha et al. (2013). These data show 899 transiting…
The Kepler space mission is devoted to finding Earth-size planets in habitable zones orbiting other stars. Its large, 105-deg field-of-view features over 156,000 stars that are observed continuously to detect and characterize planet…
We investigated the underlying architecture of planetary systems by deriving the distribution of planet multiplicity (number of planets) and the distribution of orbital inclinations based on the sample of planet candidates discovered by the…
Circumbinary planets whose orbits become unstable may be ejected, accreted, or even captured by one of the stars. We quantify the relative rates of these channels, for a binary of secondary star's mass fraction 0.1 with an orbit of 1AU. The…
Discoveries from the prime Kepler mission demonstrated that small planets (< 3 Earth-radii) are common outcomes of planet formation. While Kepler detected many such planets, all but a handful orbit faint, distant stars and are not amenable…
The Kepler space mission discovered about a dozen planets orbiting around binary stars systems. Most of these circumbinary planets lie near their instability boundaries at about 3 to 5 binary separations. Past attempts to match these final…
The discovery of many planets using the Kepler telescope includes ten planets orbiting eight binary stars. Three binaries, Kepler-16, Kepler-47, and Kepler-453, have at least one planet in the circumbinary habitable-zone (BHZ). We constrain…
Observations of circumbinary planets orbiting very close to the central stars have shown that planet formation may occur in a very hostile environment, where the gravitational pull from the binary should be very strong on the primordial…
Numerous circumbinary planets have been discovered in surveys of transiting planets. Often, these planets are found to orbit near to the zone of dynamical instability, close to the central binary. The existence of these planets has been…
No circumbinary planets have been discovered smaller than 3 Earth radii, yet planets of this small size comprise over 75% of the discoveries around single stars. The observations do not prove the non-existence of small circumbinary planets,…