Related papers: The binary mass ratios of circumbinary planet host…
The dynamical influence of binary companions is expected to profoundly influence planetary systems. However, the difficulty of identifying planets in binary systems has left the magnitude of this effect uncertain; despite numerous…
Extrasolar planets that pass in front of their host star (transit) cause a temporary decrease in the apparent brightness of the star once per orbit, providing a direct measure of the planet's size and orbital period. In some systems with…
In close eclipsing binaries, measurements of the variations in binary's eclipse timing may be used to infer information about the existence of circumbinary objects. To determine the possibility of the detection of such variations with CoRoT…
Ranked near the top of the long list of exciting discoveries made with NASA's Kepler photometer is the detection of transiting circumbinary planets. In just over a year the number of such planets went from zero to seven, including a…
Nearby companions alter the evolution of massive stars in binary systems. Using a sample of Galactic massive stars in nearby young clusters, we simultaneously measure all intrinsic binary characteristics relevant to quantify the frequency…
The abundance and properties of planets orbiting binary stars - circumbinary planets - are largely unknown because they are difficult to detect with currently available techniques. Results from the Kepler satellite and other studies…
Photometric observations and analysis of twelve previously poorly studied contact binary systems is presented. All show total eclipses and have extremely low mass ratios ranging from 0.072 to 0.15. Also, all show characteristics of orbital…
Although it is commonly agreed that the presence of a close stellar companion is likely to affect planet formation and evolution, the precise effects and their actual impact on planet occurrence and properties are still debated. In…
Binaries have played a crucial role many times in the history of modern astronomy and are doing so again in the rapidly evolving exploration of the Kuiper Belt. The large fraction of transneptunian objects that are binary or multiple, 48…
A large number of direct imaging surveys for exoplanets have been performed in recent years, yielding the first directly imaged planets and providing constraints on the prevalence and distribution of wide planetary systems. However, like…
Astronomers do not have a complete picture of the effects of wide-binary companions (semimajor axes greater than 100 AU) on the formation and evolution of exoplanets. We investigate these effects using new data from Gaia EDR3 and the TESS…
Identifying rocky planets in or near the habitable zones of their stars (near-Earth analogs) is one of the key motivations of many past and present planet-search missions. The census of near-Earth analogs is important because it informs…
One notable example of exoplanet diversity is the population of circumbinary planets, which orbit around both stars of a binary star system. There are so far only 16 known circumbinary exoplanets, all of which lie in the same orbital plane…
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…
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…
[ABRIDGED] Since the discovery of the first transiting extrasolar planet, transit timing has been recognized as a powerful method to discover and characterize additional planets in these systems. However, the gravitational influence of…
In this paper, we determine the detectability of eclipsing binary star companions from eclipse timing variations using the Kepler mission dataset. Extensive and precise stellar time-series photometry from space-based missions enable…
The radius of a planet is a fundamental parameter that probes its composition and habitability. Precise radius measurements are typically derived from the fraction of starlight blocked when a planet transits its host star. The wide-field…
Observational biases distort our view of nature, such that the patterns we see within a surveyed population of interest are often unrepresentative of the truth we seek. Transiting planets currently represent the most informative data set on…
We selected mass-transferring binary candidates from the catalog of Kepler eclipsing binary stars and investigated the dependence of the mass-transfer rate on several astrophysical quantities, including orbital period, semi-major axis, mass…