SHAO Astrophysics Colloquia

Circumbinary Planets

Speaker: Dong Lai (Cornell U.)

Location: Lecture Hall, 3rd floor

In the last few years, the Kepler Spacecraft has found a dozen or so transiting planets orbiting around binary stars. The existence of these circumbinary planets suggests that planets can form efficiently around stellar binaries. I will discuss some of the challenges to the theory of planet formation posed by these cicumbinary planets, focusing on the issue of the survival of planets around shrinking binaries.