Related papers: Instrument Performance in Kepler's First Months
The Kepler Mission is uniquely suited to study the frequencies of extrasolar planets. This goal requires knowledge of the incidence of false positives such as eclipsing binaries in the background of the targets, or physically bound to them,…
We carried out the first high-resolution transit observations of the exoplanet WASP-49 Ab with Keck/HIRES. Upon custom wavelength calibration we achieve a Doppler RV precision of $<$ 60 ${\rm m\,s}^{-1}$. This is an improvement in RV…
We measure the binarity of detached M-dwarfs in the Kepler field with orbital periods in the range of 1-90 days. Kepler's photometric precision and nearly continuous monitoring of stellar targets over time baselines ranging from 3 months to…
The Kepler planet sample can only be used to reconstruct the underlying planet occurrence rate if the detection efficiency of the Kepler pipeline is known, here we present the results of a second experiment aimed at characterising this…
Reported are UBV and uvbybeta observations of 15 candidates for Kepler primary astero- seismic targets and 14 other stars in the Kepler field, carried out at the M.G. Fracastoro station of the Catania Astrophysical Observatory. These data…
Stellar activity contamination of radial velocity (RV) data is one of the top challenges plaguing the field of extreme precision RV (EPRV) science. Previous work has shown that photometry can be very effective at removing such signals from…
We present a new analysis of Kepler-21, the brightest (V = 8.5) Kepler system with a known transiting exoplanet, Kepler-21 b. Kepler-21 b is a radius valley planet ($R = 1.6\pm 0.2 R_{\oplus}$) with an Earth-like composition (8.38$\pm$1.62…
Given the extreme precision attainable with the Kepler Space Telescope, the mitigation of instrumental artefacts is very important. In an earlier paper (Murphy 2012), the characteristics of Kepler data were discussed in light of their…
We present numerical simulations for a possible synthesis imaging mode of the Space Interferometer Mission (SIM). We summarize the general techniques that SIM offers to perform imaging of high surface brightness sources, and discuss their…
Space missions designed for high precision photometric monitoring of stars often under-sample the point-spread function, with much of the light landing within a single pixel. Missions like MOST, Kepler, BRITE, and TESS, do this to avoid…
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…
In the first three years of operation the Kepler mission found 3,697 planet candidates from a set of 18,406 transit-like features detected on over 200,000 distinct stars. Vetting candidate signals manually by inspecting light curves and…
Photometric phase curves provide an important window onto exoplanetary atmospheres and potentially even their surfaces. With similar amplitudes to occultations but far longer baselines, they have a higher sensitivity to planetary photons at…
We apply a PCA-based pre-whitening method to the entire collection of main Kepler mission long-cadence data for KIC 8462852 spanning four years. This technique removes the correlated variations of instrumental origin in both the detected…
NASA's Kepler Space Telescope has collected high-precision, high-cadence time series photometry on 781,590 unique postage-stamp targets across 21 different fields of view. These observations have already yielded 2,496 scientific…
The Kepler mission has provided a wealth of data, revealing new insights in time-domain astronomy. However, Kepler's single band-pass has limited studies to a single wavelength. In this work we build a data-driven, pixel-level model for the…
Ground-based exoplanet surveys such as SuperWASP, HATNet and KELT have discovered close to two hundred transiting extrasolar planets in the past several years. The strategy of these surveys is to look at a large field of view and measure…
Kepler-78b is a transiting Earth-mass planet in an 8.5 hr orbit discovered by the Kepler Space Mission. We performed an analysis of the published radial velocity measurements for Kepler-78 in order to derive a refined measurement for the…
We review the systematic uncertainties that have plagued attempts to obtain high precision and high accuracy from ground-based photometric measurements using CCDs. We identify two main challenges in breaking through the 1% precision…
A planet's orbital eccentricity is fundamental to understanding the present dynamical state of a system and is a relic of its formation history. There is high scientific value in measuring eccentricities of Kepler and TESS planets given the…