Circumbinary Planets via Microlensing
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Date
2015-05
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
Circumbinary planets (planets that orbit around both members of a binary star system) have been the subject of many recent discoveries from Kepler data. Since their discovery, some focus has shifted to learning more about how these planets form. Many of the detected circumbinary planets have close orbits of 1 AU or less, since these are the planets that Kepler data are most likely to find. Circumbinaries with larger separations could provide insight into how these planets formed. Microlensing is a good technique to detect such planets due to its ability to detect small planets at large separations from their host. Here, we examine the parameter-space of wider circumbinary planets to see what circumbinary planet systems may look like as micrcolensing events, and we examine their caustic structures. These systems produce interesting caustic geometries in many cases. We also compare the movement of the caustics induced by the orbital motion of the binary star with the movement induced by the planet. Finally, we estimate a lower limit to the detectability of these circumbinaries in microlensing when the planet is very close to the Einstein radius.
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Keywords
Astronomy, Microlensing, Exoplanets, Circumbinary