Related papers: Kepler Science Operations
The Kepler-9 system harbors three known transiting planets. The system holds significant interest for several reasons. First, the outer two planets exhibit a period ratio that is close to a 2:1 orbital commensurability, with attendant…
The NASA Exoplanet Archive and the Exoplanet Follow-up Observing Program service are two widely used resources for the exoplanet community. The NASA Exoplanet Archive provides a complete and accurate accounting of exoplanetary systems…
One of the primary mission goals of the Kepler space telescope is to detect Earth-like terrestrial planets in the habitable zone around Sun-like stars. Unfortunately, such planets are at the detection limit. Estimating their statistical…
Observations of exoplanetary systems provide clues about the intrinsic distribution of planetary systems, their architectures, and how they formed. We develop a forward modelling framework for generating populations of planetary systems and…
The vast majority of the 4700 confirmed planets and planet candidates discovered by the Kepler mission were first found by the Kepler pipeline. In the pipeline, after a transit signal is found, all data points associated with those transits…
We investigate the role that planet detection order plays in the Kepler planet detection pipeline. The Kepler pipeline typically detects planets in order of descending signal strength (MES). We find that the detectability of transits…
The Kepler space telescope has opened new vistas in exoplanet discovery space by revealing populations of Earth-sized planets that provide a new context for understanding planet formation. Approximately 70% of all stars in the Galaxy belong…
With the step-and-stare approach of the K2 mission, Kepler will be able to observe a large number of Cepheid an RR Lyrae stars. In this paper we describe the target selection efforts, and the first impressions based on the K2 two-wheel…
Kepler-51 is a $\lesssim 1\,\mathrm{Gyr}$-old Sun-like star hosting three transiting planets with radii $\approx 6$-$9\,R_\oplus$ and orbital periods $\approx 45$-$130\,\mathrm{days}$. Transit timing variations (TTVs) measured with past…
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…
The Kepler survey has provided a wealth of astrophysical knowledge by continuously monitoring over 150,000 stars. The resulting database contains thousands of examples of known variability types and at least as many that cannot be…
In the last decade, over a million stars were monitored to detect transiting planets. Manual interpretation of potential exoplanet candidates is labor intensive and subject to human error, the results of which are difficult to quantify.…
We present a new catalog of Kepler planet candidates that prioritizes accuracy of planetary dispositions and properties over uniformity. This catalog contains 4376 transiting planet candidates, including 1791 residing within 709…
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…
We report the distribution of planets as a function of planet radius (R_p), orbital period (P), and stellar effective temperature (Teff) for P < 50 day orbits around GK stars. These results are based on the 1,235 planets (formally "planet…
Doppler planet searches have discovered that giant planets follow orbits with a wide range of orbital eccentricities, revolutionizing theories of planet formation. The discovery of hundreds of exoplanet candidates by NASA's Kepler mission…
We show that a wide-field Kepler-like satellite in Solar orbit could obtain microlens parallaxes for several thousand events per year that are identified from the ground, yielding masses and distances for several dozen planetary events.…
Exoplanetary science has reached a historic moment. The James Webb Space Telescope will be capable of probing the atmospheres of rocky planets, and perhaps even search for biologically produced gases. However this is contingent on…
Context. During the primary Kepler mission, between 2009 and 2013, about 150,000 pre-selected targets were observed with a 29.42 minute-long cadence. However, a survey of background stars that fall within the field of view (FOV) of the…
Eighty planetary systems of two or more planets are known to orbit stars other than the Sun. For most, the data can be sufficiently explained by non-interacting Keplerian orbits, so the dynamical interactions of these systems have not been…