Related papers: Initial Characteristics of Kepler Long Cadence Dat…

The Kepler Mission is exploring the diversity of planets and planetary systems. Its legacy will be a catalog of discoveries sufficient for computing planet occurrence rates as a function of size, orbital period, star-type, and insolation…

We present the first data release of the Kepler Smear Campaign, using collateral 'smear' data obtained in the Kepler four-year mission to reconstruct light curves of 102 stars too bright to have been otherwise targeted. We describe the…

The Kepler Mission is a Discovery mission supported by NASA's Science Mission Directorate, and its primary aim is to discover Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone of solar-type stars. The space telescope was designed with a photometer…

The proposed field-of-view of the Kepler mission is at an ecliptic latitude of ~55 degrees, where the surface density of scattered Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) is a few percent that in the ecliptic plane. The rate of occultations of Kepler…

The coolest dwarf stars targeted by the Kepler Mission constitute a relatively small but scientifically valuable subset of the Kepler target stars, and provide a high-fidelity and nearby sample of transiting planetary systems. Using…

We present the initial results of a 40 night contiguous ground-based campaign of time series photometric observations of a 1.39 sq. deg field located within the NASA Kepler mission field of view. The goal of this pre-launch survey was to…

We present a new transit timing catalog of 2599 Kepler Objects of Interest (=KOIs), using the PDC-MAP long-cadence light curves that include the full seventeen quarters of the mission (ftp://wise- ftp.tau.ac.il/pub/tauttv/TTV/ver_112). The…

The Kepler mission provides an exciting opportunity to study the lightcurves of stars with unprecedented precision and continuity of coverage. This is the first look at a large sample of stars with photometric data of a quality that has…

The determination of exoplanet properties and occurrence rates using Kepler data critically depends on our knowledge of the fundamental properties (such as temperature, radius and mass) of the observed stars. We present revised stellar…

We present results from high-resolution, optical to near-IR imaging of host stars of Kepler Objects of Interest (KOIs), identified in the original Kepler field. Part of the data were obtained under the Kepler imaging follow-up observation…

Stellar rotation plays a key role in stellar activity. The rotation period could be detected through light curve variations caused by starspots. Kepler provides two types of light curves, one is the Pre-search Data Conditioning (PDC) light…

Solar system planets move on almost circular orbits. In strong contrast, many massive gas giant exoplanets travel on highly elliptical orbits, whereas the shape of the orbits of smaller, more terrestrial, exoplanets remained largely…

Light curves from the Kepler Mission contain valuable information on the nature of the phenomena producing the transit-like signals. To assist in exploring the possibility that they are due to an astrophysical false positive, we describe a…

Kepler provides light curves of 156,000 stars with unprecedented precision. However, the raw data as they come from the spacecraft contain significant systematic and stochastic errors. These errors, which include discontinuities, systematic…

Context: Transit surveys, both ground- and space- based, have already accumulated a large number of light curves that span several years. Aims: The search for transiting planets in these long time series is computationally intensive. We…

By surveying new fields for the shortest-period "big" planets, the Kepler spacecraft could provide the statistics to more clearly measure the occurrence distributions of giant and medium planets. This would allow separate determinations for…

A key goal of the Kepler mission is the discovery of Earth-size transiting planets in "habitable zones" where stellar irradiance maintains a temperate climate on an Earth-like planet. Robust estimates of planet radius and irradiance require…

A re-purposed Kepler mission could continue the search for nearly Earth-sized planets in very short-period (< 1 day) orbits. Recent surveys of the Kepler data already available have revealed at least a dozen such planetary candidates, and a…

Never before has the detection and characterization of exoplanets via transit photometry been as promising and feasible as it is now, due to the increasing breadth and sensitivity of time domain optical surveys. Past works have made use of…

We provide updates to the Kepler planet candidate sample based upon nearly two years of high-precision photometry (i.e., Q1-Q8). From an initial list of nearly 13,400 Threshold Crossing Events (TCEs), 480 new host stars are identified from…