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Transiting circumbinary planets Kepler-34 b and Kepler-35 b

2012; Nature Portfolio; Volume: 481; Issue: 7382 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1038/nature10768

1476-4687

William F. Welsh, Jerome A. Orosz, Joshua A. Carter, Daniel C. Fabrycky, Eric B. Ford, Jack J. Lissauer, A. Prša, Samuel N. Quinn, Darin Ragozzine, Donald R. Short, Guillermo Torres, Joshua N. Winn, Laurance R. Doyle, Thomas Barclay, Natalie M. Batalha, S. Bloemen, Erik Brugamyer, Lars A. Buchhave, Caroline Caldwell, Douglas A. Caldwell, Jessie L. Christiansen, David R. Ciardi, William D. Cochran, Michael Endl, Jonathan J. Fortney, T. N. Gautier, Ronald L. Gilliland, Michael R. Haas, Jennifer R. Hall, Matthew J. Holman, Andrew W. Howard, Steve B. Howell, Howard Isaacson, Jon M. Jenkins, Todd C. Klaus, David W. Latham, Jie Li, Geoffrey W. Marcy, T. Mazeh, Elisa V. Quintana, Paul Robertson, Avi Shporer, Jason H. Steffen, Gur Windmiller, David Koch, W. J. Borucki,

Astro and Planetary Science

Most Sun-like stars in the Galaxy reside in gravitationally-bound pairs of stars called "binary stars". While long anticipated, the existence of a "circumbinary planet" orbiting such a pair of normal stars was not definitively established until the discovery of Kepler-16. Incontrovertible evidence was provided by the miniature eclipses ("transits") of the stars by the planet. However, questions remain about the prevalence of circumbinary planets and their range of orbital and physical properties. Here we present two additional transiting circumbinary planets, Kepler-34 and Kepler-35. Each is a low-density gas giant planet on an orbit closely aligned with that of its parent stars. Kepler-34 orbits two Sun-like stars every 289 days, while Kepler-35 orbits a pair of smaller stars (89% and 81% of the Sun's mass) every 131 days. Due to the orbital motion of the stars, the planets experience large multi-periodic variations in incident stellar radiation. The observed rate of circumbinary planets implies > ~1% of close binary stars have giant planets in nearly coplanar orbits, yielding a Galactic population of at least several million.