Institute for Advanced Study Informal Astrophysics Seminar

The prime Kepler mission provided high-precision photometric light curves for 10^5 stars continuously over 4 years. While the search for exoplanetary transits in these data was originally focused on signals with periods less than about a year, dedicated searches performed by several groups (including ours) in the past few years have uncovered the signals with longer periods. I will discuss how the population of long-period transiting exo-Jupiters from these searches, when combined with the information from Doppler surveys for the same type of planets, constrains the flatness of exoplanetary systems hosting exo-Jupiters. I will also present self-lensing white dwarf binaries found from the same searches, including a mysterious system that may challenge our current understanding on the formation of extremely low-mass white dwarfs in binaries.