New results from TESS towards small stars and transiting circumbinary planets

  • CART Astrophysics Seminar Series

November 13, 2025 2:00 PM
PAIS 3205

Host:
Diana Dragomir
Presenter:
Dominic Oddo (UNM)
The NASA TESS mission, launched in 2018, is optimized to search for transiting exoplanets orbiting bright, nearby stars, thus offering a census of short-period planets in our backyard. Because of its high sampling cadence and near-complete sky coverage, it is also an excellent mission to study short period eclipsing binary systems. Eclipsing binaries (EBs) are important to stellar astrophysics for a variety of reasons. Well-characterized EBs can provide constraints to fundamental stellar properties, and serve as probes of stellar activity and stellar formation. In this talk, I will discuss my recent work to compile a catalog of very low-mass eclipsing binaries (M&Ms), which enables the detection of small circumbinary planets (CBPs; those that orbit outside of both stars in a tight stellar binary). I will discuss the results from this catalog, including implications for how small stars form and evolve. Finally, I will discuss recent efforts towards a search for circumbinary planets in TESS data.

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