Abstract
In the past decade, space-based transit surveys have delivered thousands of potential planet-hosting systems. Each of these needs to be vetted and characterized using follow-up high-resolution imaging. We perform comprehensive imaging surveys of the candidate exoplanets detected by the Kepler and TESS missions using the fully autonomous Robo-AO system and the largely autonomous SOAR speckle imaging system. The surveys yielded hundreds of previously unknown close binary systems hosting exoplanets and resulted in verification of hundreds of exoplanet systems. Evidence of the interaction between binary stars and planetary systems was also detected, including a deep deficit of planets in close binary systems.
Highlights
Over the past decade, the Kepler telescope (Borucki et al, 2010) and its follow-up mission, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS, Ricker et al, 2014), have detected the majority of known exoplanets
Between 2012 and 2016, Robo-AO was used by our team to observe every Kepler Object of Interest (KOI) system (Law et al, 2014; Baranec et al, 2016; Ziegler et al, 2017; Ziegler et al, 2018a; Ziegler et al, 2018c)
If we assume a physical separation distribution for binaries around exoplanet hosts as we find for field stars (Raghavan et al, 2010) which peaks at 50 AU, many more real binaries would be resolvable around TESS planet hosts compared to Kepler planet hosts
Summary
The Kepler telescope (Borucki et al, 2010) and its follow-up mission, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS, Ricker et al, 2014), have detected the majority of known exoplanets. Between 2012 and 2016, Robo-AO was used by our team to observe every Kepler Object of Interest (KOI) system (Law et al, 2014; Baranec et al, 2016; Ziegler et al, 2017; Ziegler et al, 2018a; Ziegler et al, 2018c) These observations were typically sensitive to nearby stars as close as the diffraction limit of the telescope (approximately 0.15ʺ) and to stars up to six magnitudes fainter than the target star. Within this survey, nearly 95% of Kepler planetary candidates host stars (3,857 KOIs in total) were observed, and 620 stars with separations less than a few arcseconds were detected.
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