Encyclopedia of Astrobiology

2015 Edition
| Editors: Muriel Gargaud, William M. Irvine, Ricardo Amils, Henderson James (Jim) CleavesII, Daniele L. Pinti, José Cernicharo Quintanilla, Daniel Rouan, Tilman Spohn, Stéphane Tirard, Michel Viso

Kepler 47: First Multi-circumbinary Planet System

Reference work entry
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44185-5_5296

Definition

The eclipsing binary Kepler-47 is the first system detected to have multiple  circumbinary planets (Orosz et al. 2012). The binary consists of a Sun-like star and a companion roughly one-third its size, orbiting each other every 7.45 days. The planets were detected using transit photometry when each planet transits the stars of the binary. Figure 1 shows some of the planetary transits of this system. The inner and outer planets of Kepler-47 system have radii 3.0 and 4.6 times that of Earth, respectively. The inner planet, Kepler-47b, has an orbital period of 49.5 days. The outer planet’s orbital period is 303.2 days.
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References and Further Reading

  1. Haghighipour N, Kaltenegger L (2013) Calculating the habitable zone of binary star systems. II. P-type binaries. Astrophys J 777, 166CrossRefADSGoogle Scholar
  2. Orosz JA et al. (2012) Kepler-47: a transiting circumbinary multiplanet system. Science 337:1511CrossRefADSGoogle Scholar

Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Institute for AstronomyUniversity of Hawaii-ManoaHonolulu, HawaiiUSA