The Plurality of Worlds

Amaury Triaud, University of Birmingham, UK - 28.01.19

Abstract:

To start with, I will describe the important of investigating planets orbiting stars that are different than the Sun. Amongst those are circumbinary planets, planets that orbit around both stars of a binary system. I will describe a new radial velocity survey, called BEBOP, taking place with the HARPS and SOPHIE spectrographs. BEBOP's goal is to identify circumbinary planets and measure their properties. This mysterious population is particularly challenging to understand. Theoretical work informs us circumbinary planets should be rare, yet, early discoveries with the Kepler spacecraft are consistent with a population that is as frequent as planets orbiting single stars. In this talk I will describe the motivations behind our survey, as well as some of our results.