English

Identification and Removal of Noise Modes in Kepler Photometry

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics 2015-06-11 v1 Earth and Planetary Astrophysics

Abstract

We present the Transiting Exoearth Robust Reduction Algorithm (TERRA) --- a novel framework for identifying and removing instrumental noise in Kepler photometry. We identify instrumental noise modes by finding common trends in a large ensemble of light curves drawn from the entire Kepler field of view. Strategically, these noise modes can be optimized to reveal transits having a specified range of timescales. For Kepler target stars of low photometric noise, TERRA produces ensemble-calibrated photometry having 33 ppm RMS scatter in 12-hour bins, rendering individual transits of earth-size planets around sun-like stars detectable as ~3 sigma signals.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1208.4554,
  title  = {Identification and Removal of Noise Modes in Kepler Photometry},
  author = {Erik A. Petigura and Geoffrey W. Marcy},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1208.4554},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

18 pages, 7 figures, submitted to PASP