2021/01/08 by David V. Martin, Daniel C. Fabrycky
Immunology and Microbiology · Physics and Astronomy · #Alexander von Humboldt Studies #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Binary number #Binary star #Circumbinary planet #Kepler-47 #Planet #Stars #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #Transit (satellite) #astro-ph.EP #astro-ph.SR
paper · pdf · doi:10.3847/1538-3881/abeab1
Under review at ApJ after responding to first referee report. 32 pages. 17 figures (some pretty)
arxiv created 2021/01/08 · openalex created_date 2021/01/18 · openalex publication_date 2021/08/02 · arxiv updated 2021/08/11 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Abstract No circumbinary planets have been discovered smaller than 3 R ⊕ , yet planets of this small size comprise over 75% of the discoveries around single stars. The observations do not prove the nonexistence of small circumbinary planets; rather, they are much harder to find than around single stars because their transit timing variations are much larger than the transit durations. We present Stanley, an automated algorithm to find small circumbinary planets. It employs custom methods to detrend eclipsing binary light curves and stack shallow transits of variable duration and interval using N -body integrations. Applied to the Kepler circumbinaries, we recover all known planets, including the three planets of Kepler-47, and constrain the absence of additional planets of similar or smaller size. We also show that we could have detected <3 R ⊕ planets in half of the known systems. Our work will ultimately be applied to a broad sample of eclipsing binaries to (hopefully) produce new discoveries and derive a circumbinary size distribution that can be compared to that for single stars.