Terrestrial Planet Occurrence Rates for the Kepler GK Dwarf Sample
Abstract
We measure planet occurrence rates using the planet candidates discovered by the Q1-Q16 Kepler pipeline search. This study examines planet occurrence rates for the Kepler GK dwarf target sample for planet radii, 0.75<Rp<2.5 Rearth, and orbital periods, 50<Porb<300 days, with an emphasis on a thorough exploration and identification of the most important sources of systematic uncertainties. Integrating over this parameter space, we measure an occurrence rate of F=0.77 planets per star, with an allowed range of 0.3<F<1.9. The allowed range takes into account both statistical and systematic uncertainties, and values of F beyond the allowed range are significantly in disagreement with our analysis. We generally find higher planet occurrence rates and a steeper increase in planet occurrence rates towards small planets than previous studies of the Kepler GK dwarf sample. Through extrapolation, we find that the one year orbital period terrestrial planet occurrence rate, zeta_1=0.1, with an allowed range of 0.01<zeta_1<2, where zeta_1 is defined as the number of planets per star within 20% of the Rp and Porb of Earth. For G dwarf hosts, the zeta_1 parameter space is a subset of the larger eta_earth parameter space, thus zeta_1 places a lower limit on eta_earth for G dwarf hosts. From our analysis, we identify the leading sources of systematics impacting Kepler occurrence rate determinations as: reliability of the planet candidate sample, planet radii, pipeline completeness, and stellar parameters.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1506.04175,
title = {Terrestrial Planet Occurrence Rates for the Kepler GK Dwarf Sample},
author = {Christopher J. Burke and Jessie L. Christiansen and F. Mullally and Shawn Seader and Daniel Huber and Jason F. Rowe and Jeffrey L. Coughlin and Susan E. Thompson and Joseph Catanzarite and Bruce D. Clarke and Timothy D. Morton and Douglas A. Caldwell and Stephen T. Bryson and Michael R. Haas and Natalie M. Batalha and Jon M. Jenkins and Peter Tenenbaum and Joseph D. Twicken and Jie Li and Elisa Quintana and Thomas Barclay and Christopher E. Henze and William J. Borucki and Steve B. Howell and Martin Still},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1506.04175},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
19 Pages, 17 Figures, Submitted ApJ. Python source to support Kepler pipeline completeness estimates available at http://github.com/christopherburke/KeplerPORTs/