Results tagged “circumbinary”

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.

Circumbinary planets whose orbits become unstable may be ejected, accreted, or even captured by one of the stars.

To date, 17 circumbinary planets have been discovered. In this paper, we focus our attention on the stability of the Kepler circumbinary planetary systems with only one planet, i.e. Kepler-16, Kepler-34, Kepler-35, Kepler-38, Kepler-64 and Kepler-413.

Recently, the Kepler Space Telescope has detected several planets in orbit around a close binary star system.

Circumbinary planets have been the subject of much recent work, providing both simulations and new discoveries. We present the first observationally based determination of the rate of occurrence of these planets.



Previous attempts to describe circumbinary habitable zones have been concerned with the spatial extent of the zone, calculated analytically according to the combined radiation field of both stars.

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.

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).

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