thesis

Stellar companions to exoplanet host stars: A Lucky Imaging survey of transiting exoplanet systems

Abstract

About half of all nearby stars are part of a binary or multiple star system, yet little is known about how multiplicity affects the formation and subsequent evolution of planetary systems. For instance, stellar companions may promote the inward migration of massive planets into very short orbits or cause misalignment between the planetary orbit and the stellar spin axis depending on the properties of the system. Moreover, the ignorance about the presence of a close stellar companion to a transiting exoplanet host star may introduce biases in the derivation of planetary parameters. In this thesis, I present the results of our Lucky Imaging search for stellar companions around more than 100 transiting exoplanet host stars. Besides characterizing the companion candidates, I calculate the probability that the companion candidates are gravitationally bound using two different statistic approaches, and I look for a correlation between binarity and hot Jupiters with aligned/misaligned orbits. I calculate the effect of unresolved stellar companions on the deduced planetary parameters, in particular the correction for the radii for two planets. Additionally, I present photometric and spectroscopic observations of the young binary HD102077 for which I determine the orbital parameters, the spectral type of the two components, the space motion, age, and moving group membership

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