Eine neue Methode zur Planetensuche hat 27 potenzielle zirkumbinäre Planeten entdeckt – echte „Tatooines“, die zwei statt eines Sterns umkreisen

Mods, please forgive my headline, too much fun being able to publish this on May the 4th.

Sharing this paper, our astronomers have published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: [https://academic.oup.com/mnras/advance-article/doi/10.1093/mnras/stag515/8524019](https://academic.oup.com/mnras/advance-article/doi/10.1093/mnras/stag515/8524019)

The study details how the researchers used apsidal precession, a new planet-finding method, to identify 27 new potential circumbinary planets, aka ‚real-life Tatooines‘.

Apsidal precession has been used to characterise binary stars before, but not in a large-scale search for planets. Apsidal precession involves monitoring how the binary stars’ orbit of one another – made visible by their stellar eclipses – changes over long periods of time. If there’s a variation in their (normally predictable) eclipse schedule that can’t be explained by general relativity or stellar interactions, it means a third body could be influencing the stars’ orbits – and that body could be a planet.

The study found 27 planet candidates out of 1590 binary star systems, an almost 2% rate of binary systems that could potentially host planets.

The findings were made using data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, a space telescope launched in 2018 with the mission to search for exoplanets.