Related papers: The Kepler Follow-up Observation Program
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…
The Kepler mission opened the door to a small but bonafide sample of circumbinary planets. Some initial trends have been identified and used to challenge our theories of planet and binary formation. However, the Kepler sample is not only…
Observations of very low-mass stars with Kepler represent an excellent opportunity to search for planetary transits and to characterize optical photometric variability at the cool end of the stellar mass distribution. In this paper, we…
Population studies of Kepler's multi-planet systems have revealed a surprising degree of structure in their underlying architectures. Information from a detected transiting planet can be combined with a population model to make predictions…
We describe a new metric that uses machine learning to determine if a periodic signal found in a photometric time series appears to be shaped like the signature of a transiting exoplanet. This metric uses dimensionality reduction and…
The Kepler mission has provided high quality light curves for more than 2000 eclipsing binaries. Tertiary companions to these binaries can be detected if they transit one or both stars in the binary or if they perturb the binary enough to…
NASA's Kepler Mission uses transit photometry to determine the frequency of earth-size planets in or near the habitable zone of Sun-like stars. The mission reached a milestone toward meeting that goal: the discovery of its first rocky…
In this paper, we explore the astrophysical implications of near-field microlensing and its effects on stellar transit observations, with a special emphasis on the Kepler mission. Kepler is a NASA-approved mission whose goal is to detect a…
The Kepler spacecraft is currently unable to hold a steady pointing and it is slowly drifting during observations. We believe that if one has to deal with targets that drift across the CCDs, one should at least be able to track the targets…
Data from the Kepler space telescope have led to the discovery of thousands of planet candidates. Most of these candidates are likely to be real exoplanets, but a significant number of false positives still contaminate the sample,…
All transiting planets are at risk of contamination by blends with nearby, unresolved stars. Blends dilute the transit signal, causing the planet to appear smaller than it really is, or produce a false positive detection when the target…
The architectures of multiple planet systems can provide valuable constraints on models of planet formation, including orbital migration, and excitation of orbital eccentricities and inclinations. NASA's Kepler mission has identified 1235…
Photometry of stars from the K2 extension of NASA's Kepler mission is afflicted by systematic effects caused by small (few-pixel) drifts in the telescope pointing and other spacecraft issues. We present a method for searching K2 light…
We revisit the discovery and implications of the first candidate systems to contain multiple transiting exoplanets. These systems were discovered using data from the Kepler space telescope. The initial paper, presenting five systems…
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is a NASA-sponsored Explorer mission that will perform a wide-field survey for planets that transit bright host stars. Here, we predict the properties of the transiting planets that TESS will…
We present the results of a survey aimed at discovering and studying transiting planets with orbital periods shorter than one day (ultra--short-period, or USP, planets), using data from the {\em Kepler} spacecraft. We computed Fourier…
With the discovery of the first transiting extrasolar planetary system back to 1999, a great number of projects started to hunt for other similar systems. Because of the incidence rate of such systems was unknown and the length of the…
A large fraction of white dwarfs (WDs) may host planets in their habitable zones. These planets may provide our best chance to detect bio-markers on a transiting exoplanet, thanks to the diminished contrast ratio between the Earth-sized WD…
Planet Hunters is a new citizen science project, designed to engage the public in an exoplanet search using NASA Kepler public release data. In the first month after launch, users identified two new planet candidates which survived our…
High-resolution ground-based optical speckle and near-infrared adaptive optics images are taken to search for stars in close angular proximity to host stars of candidate planets identified by the NASA Kepler Mission. Neighboring stars are a…