• Thesis and Dissertation Defenses

May 28, 2026 2:00 PM
PAIS 2540

Presenter:

Dominic Oddo

Circumbinary planets (CBPs) are worlds which orbit two stars simultaneously. CBPs are excellent tests of the tenacity of planet formation, but they are difficult to detect. The space-based NASA Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission is a nearly all-sky survey designed to detect exoplanets transiting nearby stars. The research presented herein contains new work on the detection and demographics of transiting CBPs with TESS. In this dissertation, I lay the foundation for planet detection and analysis with TESS, along with a comparison of the photometric precision of the ESA CHEOPS mission. I then define a catalog of low-mass TESS eclipsing binaries (referred to as M&Ms), which are the best sources to search for CBPs. Finally, I describe my custom transit search methodology and apply it to the aforementioned TESS M&M EB catalog. I perform injection and recovery tests to demonstrate the sensitivity of the search pipeline and apply corrections to account for the TESS window function, which I use to constrain the occurrence rate of transiting CBPs in TESS data for the first time. I find that CBPs orbiting M&Ms are rare.

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