Identifying Transiting Circumbinary Planets

TL;DR

This paper introduces CB-BLS, a modified detection method for transiting circumbinary planets, enabling their identification in noisy light curves and advancing understanding of planetary formation and stellar parameters.

Contribution

The paper develops CB-BLS, a novel algorithm tailored for detecting circumbinary planets in complex, non-periodic transit signals, improving detection capabilities in noisy data.

Findings

CB-BLS can detect CB planets in light curves with noise levels of 1% or more.

The method facilitates analysis of large photometric surveys for CB planets.

Detection of CB planets can constrain planetary formation theories.

Abstract

Transiting planets manifest themselves by a periodic dimming of their host star by a fixed amount. On the other hand, light curves of transiting circumbinary (CB) planets are expected to be neither periodic nor to have a single depth while in transit, making BLS [Kovacs et al. 2002] almost ineffective. Therefore, a modified version for the identification of CB planets was developed - CB-BLS. We show that using CB-BLS it is possible to find CB planets in the residuals of light curves of eclipsing binaries (EBs) that have noise levels of 1% or more. Using CB-BLS will allow to easily harness the massive ground- and space- based photometric surveys to look for these objects. Detecting transiting CB planets is expected to have a wide range of implications, for e.g.: The frequency of CB planets depend on the planetary formation mechanism - and planets in close pairs of stars provides a most restrictive constraint on planet formation models. Furthermore, understanding very high precision light curves is limited by stellar parameters - and since for EBs the stellar parameters are much better determined, the resultant planetary structure models will have significantly smaller error bars, maybe even small enough to challenge theory.