Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

A Search For Exozodiacal Clouds With Kepler, Christopher C. Stark, Alan P. Boss, Alycia J. Weinberger, Brian K. Jackson, Michael Endl, William D. Cochran, Marshall Johnson, Caroline Caldwell, Eric Agol, Eric B. Ford, Jennifer R. Hall, Khadeejah A. Ibrahim, Jie Li

Brian Jackson

Planets embedded within dust disks may drive the formation of large scale clumpy dust structures by trapping dust into resonant orbits. Detection and subsequent modeling of the dust structures would help constrain the mass and orbit of the planet and the disk architecture, give clues to the history of the planetary system, and provide a statistical estimate of disk asymmetry for future exoEarth-imaging missions. Here, we present the first search for these resonant structures in the inner regions of planetary systems by analyzing the light curves of hot Jupiter planetary candidates identified by the Kepler mission. We detect only one …