KEPLER 453 b—THE 10thKEPLERTRANSITING CIRCUMBINARY PLANET

Abstract

We present the discovery of Kepler-453 b, a 6.2 R Å planet in a low-eccentricity, 240.5 day orbit about an eclipsing binary. The binary itself consists of a 0.94 and 0.195 M ☉ pair of stars with an orbital period of 27.32 days. The plane of the planetʼs orbit is rapidly precessing, and its inclination only becomes sufficiently aligned with the primary star in the latter portion of the Kepler data. Thus three transits are present in the second half of the light curve, but none of the three conjunctions that occurred during the first half of the light curve produced observable transits. The precession period is ∼103 years, and during that cycle, transits are visible only ∼8.9% of the time. This has the important implication that for every system like Kepler-453 that we detect, there are ∼11.5 circumbinary systems that exist but are not currently exhibiting transits. The planetʼs mass is too small to noticeably perturb the binary, and consequently its mass is not measurable with these data; however, our photodynamical model places a 1σ upper limit of M 16 Å . With a period 8.8 times that of the binary, the planet is well outside the dynamical instability zone. It does, however, lie within the habitable zone of the binary, making it the third of 10 Kepler circumbinary planets to do so.

Revised Stellar Properties of Kepler Targets for the Q1-17 (DR25) Transit Detection Run

“…Howard et al 2012;Fressin et al 2013;Dressing & Charbonneau 2015;Burke et al 2015;Sil-burt et al 2015) as well as numerous individual discoveries such as Kepler's first rocky exoplanet, Kepler-10b (Batalha et al 2011), circumbinary planets (e.g. Orosz et al 2012b;Kostov et al 2014;Welsh et al 2015), or the detection of planets in or near the habitable zone (e.g. Barclay et al 2013;Borucki et al 2013;Torres et al 2015;Kane et al 2016).…”

THE FIRST CIRCUMBINARY PLANET FOUND BY MICROLENSING: OGLE-2007-BLG-349L(AB)c

“…So, the system consists of two host stars, OGLE-2007-BLG-349LA andOGLE-2007-BLG-349LB, orbited by a planet somewhat less massive than Saturn. Although it was the first circumbinary planet to be observed, aside from a planet orbiting a neutron star-white dwarf system (Ford et al 2000;Sigurdsson et al 2003), it was not the first circumbinary planet to be published, as 10 circumbinary planets (Doyle et al 2011;Welsh et al 2015;Kostov et al 2016) have been discovered by the Kepler mission.…”

“…These include planets orbiting a pulsar (Wolszczan & Frail 1992); hot Jupiters (Mayor & Queloz 1995); systems of short-period, low-density planets in tightly packed orbits (Lissauer 2011); and circumbinary planets (Doyle et al 2011) close to the stability limit. Circumbinary planets and planets in close binary systems are very difficult to detect with the radial velocity method, but Kepler has proved quite adept at finding such systems (Doyle et al 2011;Orosz et al 2012;Welsh et al 2012Welsh et al , 2015Kostov et al 2013Kostov et al , 2014Kostov et al , 2016. Gravitational microlensing (Bennett 2008;Gaudi 2012) has demonstrated the ability to detect such systems (Bennett et al 1999;Gould et al 2014;Poleski et al 2014;Udalski et al 2015) (either circumbinary planets or planets orbiting one member of a relatively close binary).…”

The TWA 3 Young Triple System: Orbits, Disks, Evolution

“…One approach to address this is the study of the evolution and dynamics of protoplanetary disks-the sites of planet formation around young stars. Although our own solar system is centered around a single star, it is nevertheless important to understand planet formation in multiple-star systems, not only because most stars form in binary or higher-order multiples that therefore dominate the star formation process (e.g., Duchêne & Kraus 2013), but also because a number of exoplanetary systems have been identified in binarystar systems (e.g., Doyle et al 2011;Kostov et al 2014;Welsh et al 2015). Furthermore, young multiple systems provide a means to examine how tidal interactions affect circumstellar disks.…”