New prospects for observing and cataloguing exoplanets in well-detached binaries

Abstract

This paper is devoted to study the circumstances favourable to detect circumstellar and circumbinary planets in well detached binary-star-systems using eclipse timing variations (ETVs). We investigated the dynamics of well detached binary star systems with a star separation from 0.5 to 3~AU, to determine the probability of the detection of such variations with ground based telescopes and space telescopes (like former missions CoRoT and Kepler and future space missions Plato, Tess and Cheops). For the chosen star separations both dynamical configurations (circumstellar and circumbinary) may be observable. We performed numerical simulations by using the full three-body problem as dynamical model. The dynamical stability and the ETVs are investigated by computing ETV maps for different masses of the secondary star and the exoplanet (Earth, Neptune and Jupiter size). In addition we changed the planet's and binary's eccentricities. We conclude that many amplitudes of ETVs are large enough to detect exoplanets in binary star systems. As an application, we prepared statistics of the catalogue of exoplanets in binary star systems which we introduce in this article and compared the statistics with our parameter-space which we used for our calculations. In addition to these statistics of the catalogue we enlarged them by the investigation of well detached binary star systems from several catalogues and discussed the possibility of further candidates.