The Interaction of circumbinary discs and planets and binary stars

Abstract

Binary configurations are very common in astronomy. About 50% of all stars are in a binary or multiple system. With the Kepler mission, planets orbiting around a binary configuration, circumbinary planets, have been detected. Nowadays, instruments like ALMA and the SPHERE spectrometer on the Very Large Telescope allow very detailed images of circumbinary discs, which are another key to understand not only the formation and evolution of planets, but also the evolution of the binary components themselves in the early phase with a disc present. As observations show only single images, numerical simulations are necessary to model the processes leading to the observed conditions. In this thesis circumbinary discs and embedded planets are investigated using simulations with the finite volume code GPU-PLUTO. The work discusses the structure of circumbinary discs in comparison to observations of the GG Tau A system and the migration of planets in circumbinary discs with varying disc parameters to identify which lead to the observed planet configurations. Furthermore, the theoretical possibility to create a planetary 1:1 resonance by the special conditions inside a circumbinary disc is demonstrated and the change of the binary orbits due to the circumbinary disc is explored for a large parameter space. [untranslated]