The Hunt for Exomoons with Kepler (HEK): IV. A Search for Moons around Eight M-Dwarfs

Understand

With their smaller radii and high cosmic abundance, transiting planets around cool stars hold a unique appeal.

• As part of our on-going project to measure the occurrence rate of extrasolar moons, we here present results from a survey focussing on eight Kepler planetary candidates associated with M-dwarfs.
• Using photodynamical modeling and Bayesian multimodal nested sampling, we find no compelling evidence for an exomoon in these eight systems.
• Upper limits on the presence of such bodies probe down to $\sim0.4M_{\oplus}$ in the best case.