Searching for planets around stars in wide binaries

Abstract

We present the status of the radial velocity planet search ongoing at TNG. We are observing about 50 wide binaries with similar components, searching for planets and abundance anomalies caused by the ingestion of metal-rich planetary material. A by-product of our project is the detection of several new spectroscopic binaries. No clear planet detection emerged up to now. Evaluation of the statistical significance in terms of frequency of planets in binaries is in progress. The abundance analysis of half of the sample revealed no pair with large difference. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.