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FUTURE TRANSITABILITY OF THE CIRCUMBINARY PLANET KEPLER-16-b**

Abstract

Observations with the Kepler Space Telescope revealed a special planetary class: a planet that orbits a pair of stars instead of just one, or a circumbinary planet (CBP). The first bona fide CBP (Kepler-16b) was confirmed via photometry in 2011 by the Kepler Mission using only the first two years of observations. In subsequent studies and discoveries of CBPs, it became apparent that these worlds are detectable through transit photometry only temporarily due to the fast precession of planetary orbit relative to our line-of-sight (i.e., limited transitability). We re-evaluate the photodynamical modeling of Kepler-16b using the full four years of observations from the Kepler mission, which includes four additional transits by the CBP. Our photodynamical model mostly agrees with the previous results, except it requires a slightly more massive CBP. Using our best-fitting models, we will estimate when Kepler-16b will again transit its host stars relative to our line-of-sight and whether these transits would be detectable using data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. The potential transitability of the other Kepler CBPs will also be discussed.

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