Eclipsing Binaries and the Search for Circumbinary Exoplanets in Kepler Data
Abstract
The Kepler Space Telescope has delivered light curves for about 2700 eclipsing binary star systems. Already six circumbinary planets have been discovered in the first four quarters of these data, and since then an additional ten quarters have been made public. Studying circumbinary planets can provide important clues about the planet formation process. Our project aims to improve knowledge of previously identified circumbinary planets and to conduct a search for new candidates in the Kepler data, looking for eclipses produced by the transit of the planet in front of the binary star system. We developed data reduction pipelines using PYKE and IDL to increase the signal-to-noise of the light curves and fold them with the periodicity of the binary system in order to improve our ability to detect the (diluted) signal from any planets. Here we present a few interesting objects analyzed using these pipelines.
- Publication:
-
American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- June 2013
- Bibcode:
- 2013AAS...22221714H