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The Way to Circumbinary Planets

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Handbook of Exoplanets

Abstract

The historic quest to detect circumbinary planets (CBPs) dates back to a time before the first extrasolar planets were detected. Eclipsing binary star systems (EBs) were considered prime targets for the detection of CBP transits, as it was considered likely that the planetary orbits would also be close to edge on to our line of sight and so cross (transit) the stellar discs of the eclipsing stars. The presence of CBPs remained however doubtful until the unequivocal detection, by transit, of Kepler-16b and of further CBPs with the NASA Kepler space telescope.

Stellar eclipses were also timed for about a dozen small-mass main-sequence EBs as well. In this chapter we discuss the history of theory and observations in the search for CBPs and the various techniques that have been applied, as well as several methods that might provide results in the future.

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Acknowledgements

HD acknowledges support by grant ESP2015-65712-C5-4-R of the Spanish Secretary of State for R&D&i (MINECO). This contribution has benefited from the use of the NASA Exoplanet Archive and the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia, and the authors acknowledge the people behind these tools.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for the Metaphysics of Physics, One Maybeck Place, Principia College, Elsah, IL, USA

    Laurance R. Doyle

  2. Carl Sagan Center, SETI Institute, Mountain View, CA, USA

    Laurance R. Doyle

  3. Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain

    Hans J. Deeg

  4. Departamento de Astrofísica, Universidad de La Laguna, La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain

    Hans J. Deeg

Authors
  1. Laurance R. Doyle
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  2. Hans J. Deeg
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Laurance R. Doyle .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain

    Hans J. Deeg

  2. Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain

    Juan Antonio Belmonte

Section Editor information

  1. School of Physics and Astronomy, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

    Tsevi Mazeh

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Doyle, L.R., Deeg, H.J. (2018). The Way to Circumbinary Planets. In: Deeg, H., Belmonte, J. (eds) Handbook of Exoplanets . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55333-7_115

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