Searching for Small Circumbinary Planets I. The STANLEY Automated Algorithm and No New Planets in Existing Systems

Abstract

No circumbinary planets have been discovered smaller than 3 Earth radii, yet planets of this small size comprise over 75% of the discoveries around single stars. The observations do not prove the non-existence of small circumbinary planets, but rather they are much harder to find than around single stars, because their transit timing variations are much larger than the transit durations. We present STANLEY: an automated algorithm to find small circumbinary planets. It employs custom methods to detrend eclipsing binary light curves and stack shallow transits of variable duration and interval using N-body integrations. Applied to the Kepler circumbinaries, we recover all known planets, including the three planets of Kepler-47, and constrain the absence of additional planets of similar or smaller size. We also show that we could have detected < 3 Earth radii planets in half of the known systems. Our work will ultimately be applied to a broad sample of eclipsing binaries to (hopefully) produce new discoveries, and derive a circumbinary size distribution which can be compared to that for single stars.

Under review at ApJ after responding to first referee report. 32 pages. 17 figures (some pretty)

References in corpus (19)

• DHP Framework: Digital Health Passports Using Blockchain -- Use case on international tourism during the COVID-19 pandemic
• astroquery: An Astronomical Web-Querying Package in Python
• The Transiting Circumbinary Planets Kepler-34 and Kepler-35
• Transit Least Squares: Optimized transit detection algorithm to search for periodic transits of small planets
• On the Abundance of Circumbinary Planets
• The period ratio distribution of Kepler's candidate multiplanet systems
• Planets Transiting Non-Eclipsing Binaries
• TOI-1338: TESS' First Transiting Circumbinary Planet
• Discovery of a Third Transiting Planet in the Kepler-47 Circumbinary System
• Circumbinary planets - why they are so likely to transit
• Analytic orbit propagation for transiting circumbinary planets
• Kepler-1661 b: A Neptune-sized Kepler Transiting Circumbinary Planet around a Grazing Eclipsing Binary
• Circumbinary planets II - when transits come and go
• Radial Velocities of 41 Kepler Eclipsing Binaries
• The binary mass ratios of circumbinary planet hosts
• Transit probability of precessing circumstellar planets in binaries and exomoons
• Three small transiting planets around the M dwarf host star LP 358-499
• Multiple Transits during a Single Conjunction: Identifying Transiting Circumbinary Planetary Candidates from TESS
• Discovery and Characterization of Kepler-36b

Cited by in corpus (11)

• BEBOP III. Observations and an independent mass measurement of Kepler-16 (AB) b -- the first circumbinary planet detected with radial velocities
• Formation of polar terrestrial circumbinary planets
• OGLE-2019-BLG-1470LABc: Another Microlensing Giant Planet in a Binary System?
• Terrestrial planet formation in a circumbinary disc around a coplanar binary
• Sculpting the circumbinary planet size distribution through resonant interactions with companion planets
• Misaligned circumbinary disks as efficient progenitors of interstellar asteroids
• Misalignment of terrestrial circumbinary planets as an indicator of their formation mechanism
• Coplanar circumbinary planets can be unstable to large tilt oscillations in the presence of an inner polar planet
• Orbital stability of two circumbinary planets around misaligned eccentric binaries
• Statistics of Magrathea exoplanets beyond the Main Sequence. Simulating the long-term evolution of circumbinary giant planets with TRES
• TIC 172900988: A Transiting Circumbinary Planet Detected in One Sector of TESS Data