An algorithm for photometric identification of transiting circumbinary planets

Abstract

Transiting planets manifest themselves by a periodic dimming of their host star by a fixed amount. On the other hand, light curves of transiting circumbinary (CB) planets are expected to be neither periodic nor to have a single depth while in transit. These propertied make the popular transit finding algorithm BLS almost ineffective so a modified version of BLS for the identification of CB planets was developed - CB-BLS. We show that using this algorithm it is possible to find CB planets in the residuals of light curves of eclipsing binaries that have noise levels of 1% and more - quality that is routinely achieved by current ground-based transit surveys. Previous searches for CB planets using variation of eclipse times minima of CM Dra and elsewhere are more closely related to radial velocity than to transit searches and so are quite distinct from CB-BLS. Detecting CB planets is expected to have significant impact on our understanding of exoplanets in general, and exoplanet formation in particular. Using CB-BLS will allow to easily harness the massive ground- and space- based photometric surveys in operation to look for these hard-to-find objects.