Recent Kepler Results On Circumbinary Planets

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 multi-planet system with one of the planets in the habitable zone (Kepler-47).

We are quickly learning to better detect and characterize these planets, including the recognition of their transit timing and duration variation “smoking gun” signature. Even with only a handful of such planets, some exciting trends are emerging.

William F. Welsh, Jerome A. Orosz, Joshua A. Carter, Daniel C. Fabrycky (Submitted on 28 Aug 2013)

Comments: To appear in “The Formation, Detection, and Characterization of Extrasolar Habitable Planets”, Proceedings of the IAU Symposium 293, Ed. Nader Haghighipour; 8 pages 4 figures

Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)

Cite as: arXiv:1308.6328 [astro-ph.EP]

(or arXiv:1308.6328v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version) Submission history From: William Welsh [view email] [v1] Wed, 28 Aug 2013 22:51:45 GMT (96kb)