Overview
- A study in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society reports 27 circumbinary planet candidates found in TESS observations of 1,590 eclipsing binary stars.
- The team used apsidal precession, which looks for tiny, long‑term changes in when the two stars eclipse each other that can reveal a third body.
- The candidate rate is about 2 percent, with estimated masses from roughly Neptune to about ten times Jupiter and distances of roughly 650 to 18,000 light‑years.
- Researchers emphasize the objects are unconfirmed candidates that need further checks to rule out stellar activity, relativity effects, or other non‑planet causes.
- The candidates appear in both hemispheres, and the team says future wide surveys such as the Rubin Observatory’s LSST could uncover thousands more if the trend holds.