We present high precision photometry of Kepler-41, a giant planet in a 1.86 day orbit around a G6V star that was recently confirmed through radial velocity measurements. We have developed a new method to confirm giant planets solely from the photometric light curve, and we apply this method herein to Kepler-41 to establish the validity of this technique. We generate a full phase photometric model by including the primary and secondary transits, ellipsoidal variations, Doppler beaming and reflected/emitted light from the planet. Third light contamination scenarios that can mimic a planetary transit signal are simulated by injecting a full range of dilution values into the model, and we re-fit each diluted light curve model to the light curve. The resulting constraints on the maximum occultation depth and stellar density combined with stellar evolution models rules out stellar blends and provides a measurement of the planet's mass, size, and temperature. We expect about two dozen Kepler giant planets can be confirmed via this method.
@article{arxiv.1303.0858,
title = {Confirmation of Hot Jupiter Kepler-41b via Phase Curve Analysis},
author = {Elisa V. Quintana and Jason F. Rowe and Thomas Barclay and Steve B. Howell and David R. Ciardi and Brice-Olivier Demory and Douglas A. Caldwell and William J. Borucki and Jessie L. Christiansen and Jon M. Jenkins and Todd C. Klaus and Benjamin J. Fulton and Robert L. Morris and Dwight T. Sanderfer and Avi Shporer and Jeffrey C. Smith and Martin Still and Susan E. Thompson},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1303.0858},
year = {2015}
}