MSI Seminar

Small Circumbinary Planets: Do They Exist And How Do We Find Them?

David Martin

Ohio State University

A dozen transiting circumbinary planets have been discovered and they are all large and gaseous (> 3 Earth radii). It is natural to pose the question: do small circumbinary planets exist? I will attempt to answer this in two ways. First, observationally, I will show the first results from a new search using the STANLEY algorithm, which was custom-built to account for three-body geometry and dynamics. Second, I will complement this with a theoretical study on the plausibility of small circumbinary planets, investigating whether they are imperiled by slow migration speeds through treacherous mean motion resonances.