Issue |
A&A
Volume 593, September 2016
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | A38 | |
Number of page(s) | 22 | |
Section | Planets and planetary systems | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201628231 | |
Published online | 07 September 2016 |
SPOTS: The Search for Planets Orbiting Two Stars
II. First constraints on the frequency of sub-stellar companions on wide circumbinary orbits
1 Institute for Astronomy, The
University of Edinburgh, Royal Observatory, Blackford Hill, Edinburgh, EH9
3HJ, UK
e-mail: mbonav@roe.ac.uk
2 INAF–Osservatorio Astronomico di
Padova, Vicolo dell’Osservatorio 5, 35122
Padova,
Italy
3 Institute for Astronomy,
ETH Zurich, Wolfgang-Pauli Strasse
27, 8093
Zurich,
Switzerland
4 Department of Astronomy, Stockholm
University, AlbaNova University Center, 106 91
Stockholm,
Sweden
5 Aix Marseille Université, CNRS, LAM
(Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille) UMR 7326, 13388
Marseille,
France
6 Institut de Planétologie et
d’Astrophysique de Grenoble, UJF, CNRS, 414 rue de la piscine, 38400
Saint-Martin-d’ Hères, France
Received:
1
February
2016
Accepted:
12
May
2016
A large number of direct imaging surveys for exoplanets have been performed in recent years, yielding the first directly imaged planets and providing constraints on the prevalence and distribution of wide planetary systems. However, like most of the radial velocity ones, these generally focus on single stars, hence binaries and higher-order multiples have not been studied to the same level of scrutiny. This motivated the Search for Planets Orbiting Two Stars (SPOTS) survey, which is an ongoing direct imaging study of a large sample of close binaries, started with VLT/NACO and now continuing with VLT/SPHERE. To complement this survey, we have identified the close binary targets in 24 published direct imaging surveys. Here we present our statistical analysis of this combined body of data. We analysed a sample of 117 tight binary systems, using a combined Monte Carlo and Bayesian approach to derive the expected values of the frequency of companions, for different values of the companion’s semi-major axis. Our analysis suggest that the frequency of sub-stellar companions in wide orbit is moderately low (≲ 13% with a best value of 6% at 95% confidence level) and not significantly different between single stars and tight binaries. One implication of this result is that the very high frequency of circumbinary planets in wide orbits around post-common envelope binaries, implied by eclipse timing, cannot be uniquely due to planets formed before the common-envelope phase (first generation planets), supporting instead the second generation planet formation or a non-Keplerian origin of the timing variations.
Key words: binaries: visual / binaries: spectroscopic
© ESO 2016
Current usage metrics show cumulative count of Article Views (full-text article views including HTML views, PDF and ePub downloads, according to the available data) and Abstracts Views on Vision4Press platform.
Data correspond to usage on the plateform after 2015. The current usage metrics is available 48-96 hours after online publication and is updated daily on week days.
Initial download of the metrics may take a while.