Related papers: The Discovery of Kepler-16b
Given the considerable percentage of stars that are members of binaries or stellar multiples in the Solar neighborhood, it is expected that many of these binaries host planets, possibly even habitable ones. The discovery of a terrestrial…
Kepler and Hubble photometry of a total of four transits by the Jupiter-sized Kepler-1625b have recently been interpreted to show evidence of a Neptune-sized exomoon. The profound implications of this first possible exomoon detection and…
Up to present date, no circumbinary planet around contact binaries were discovered neither by transit method nor by the minima times variation, although they are known having third component stars around. We thus ask: where are the…
We investigate the possibility of detecting planetary or stellar companions orbiting white dwarf binaries using the LISA gravitational radiation detector. Specifically, we consider the acceleration of the barycenter of the white dwarf…
Planetary nebulae are traditionally considered to represent the final evolutionary stage of all intermediate-mass stars ($\sim$0.7-8Msol). Recent evidence seems to contradict this picture. In particular, since the launch of the Hubble Space…
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…
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 the discovery of Kepler-15b, a new transiting exoplanet detected by NASA's Kepler mission. The transit signal with a period of 4.94 days was detected in the quarter 1 (Q1) Kepler photometry. For the first time, we have used the…
The presence of a body in an orbit around a close eclipsing binary star manifests itself through the light time effect influencing the observed times of eclipses as the close binary and the circumbinary companion both move around the common…
A growing number of close binary stars are being discovered among central stars of planetary nebulae. Recent and ongoing surveys are finding new systems and contributing to our knowledge of the evolution of close binary systems. The push to…
Rapidly rotating giant stars are relatively rare and may represent important stages of stellar evolution, resulting from stellar coalescence of close binary systems or accretion of sub-stellar companions by their hosting stars. In the…
Globular clusters produce orders of magnitude more millisecond pulsars per unit mass than the Galactic disk. Since the first cluster pulsar was uncovered twenty years ago, at least 138 have been identified - most of which are binary…
The total number of true, likely and possible planetary nebulae (PN) now known in the Milky Way is nearly 3000, double the number known a decade ago. The new discoveries are a legacy of the recent availability of wide field, narrowband…
A recent discovery by the COBE satellite is presented, and its importance discussed in the context of the physics of the early Universe. The various implications for our understanding of the structure of the Universe are outlined.
The discovery of the planet around the solar-type star 51 Pegasi marked a watershed in the search for extrasolar planets. Since then seven other solar-type stars have been discovered, of which several have surprisingly short orbital…
Only a handful of binary central stars of planetary nebulae (PNe) are known today, due to the difficulty of detecting their companions. Preliminary results from radial velocity surveys, however, seem to indicate that binarity plays a…
Recent simulations have shown that the formation of planets in circumbinary configurations (such as those recently discovered by Kepler) is dramatically hindered at the planetesimal accretion stage. The combined action of the binary and 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…
We present the results of an independent search of all ~200,000 stars observed over the four year Kepler mission (Q1-Q17) for multiplanet systems, using a three-transit minimum detection criteria to search orbital periods up to hundreds of…
Kepler's first major discoveries are two hot objects orbiting stars in its field. These may be the cores of stars that have each been eroded or disrupted by a companion star. The companion, which is the star monitored today, is likely to…