Published in

Oxford University Press (OUP), Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 1(490), p. 1313-1324, 2019

DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stz2637

Links

Tools

Export citation

Search in Google Scholar

An automated method to detect transiting circumbinary planets

This paper was not found in any repository, but could be made available legally by the author.
This paper was not found in any repository, but could be made available legally by the author.

Full text: Unavailable

Green circle
Preprint: archiving allowed
Green circle
Postprint: archiving allowed
Green circle
Published version: archiving allowed
Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

ABSTRACT To date a dozen transiting ‘Tatooines’ or circumbinary planets (CBPs) have been discovered, by eye, in the data from the Kepler mission; by contrast, thousands of confirmed circumstellar planets orbiting around single stars have been detected using automated algorithms. Automated detection of CBPs is challenging because their transits are strongly aperiodic with irregular profiles. Here, we describe an efficient and automated technique for detecting circumbinary planets that transit their binary hosts in Kepler light curves. Our method accounts for large transit timing variations (TTVs) and transit duration variations (TDVs), induced by binary reflex motion, in two ways: (1) We directly correct for large-scale TTVs and TDVs in the light curves by using Keplerian models to approximate binary and CBP orbits; and (2) We allow additional aperiodicities on the corrected light curves by employing the Quasi-periodic Automated Transit Search algorithm. We demonstrate that our method dramatically improves detection significance using simulated data and two previously identified CBP systems, Kepler-35 and Kepler-64.

Beta version