Related papers: On the Low False Positive Probabilities of Kepler …
(Abridged) NASA's Kepler mission has provided several thousand transiting planet candidates, yet only a small subset have been confirmed as true planets. Therefore, the most fundamental question about these candidates is the fraction of…
Surveys searching for transiting exoplanets have found many more candidates than they have been able to confirm as true planets. This situation is especially acute with the Kepler survey, which has found over 2300 candidates but has…
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,…
A main goal of NASA's Kepler Mission is to establish the frequency of potentially habitable Earth-size planets (eta Earth). Relatively few such candidates identified by the mission can be confirmed to be rocky via dynamical measurement of…
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…
The Kepler Mission was launched on March 6, 2009 to perform a photometric survey of more than 100,000 dwarf stars to search for terrestrial-size planets with the transit technique. Follow-up observations of planetary candidates identified…
The false-positive probability (FPP) of Kepler transiting candidates is a key value for statistical studies of candidate properties. A previous investigation of the stellar population in the Kepler field has provided an estimate for the FPP…
The Kepler mission has discovered thousands of planet candidates. Currently, some of them have already been discarded; more than 200 have been confirmed by follow-up observations, and several hundreds have been validated. However, most of…
We present an investigation of twelve candidate transiting planets from Kepler with orbital periods ranging from 34 to 207 days, selected from initial indications that they are small and potentially in the habitable zone (HZ) of their…
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…
Using the OSIRIS instrument installed on the 10.4-m Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) we acquired multi-color transit photometry of four small (Rp < 5 R_Earth) short-period (P < 6 days) planet candidates recently identified by the Kepler space…
We present a statistical analysis that demonstrates that the overwhelming majority of Kepler candidate multiple transiting systems (multis) indeed represent true, physically-associated transiting planets. Binary stars provide the primary…
The unprecedented photometric precision of Kepler mission allows searching for Earth-like planets. However, it remains difficult to distinguish these low signal-to-noise planets from the false alarms originating from correlated and…
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…
The Kepler Mission was launched on March 6, 2009 to perform a photometric survey of more than 100,000 dwarf stars to search for Earth-size planets with the transit technique. The reliability of the resulting planetary candidate list relies…
We extend the statistical analysis of Lissauer et al. (2012, ApJ 750, 112), which demonstrates that the overwhelming majority of Kepler candidate multiple transiting systems (multis) represent true transiting planets, and develop therefrom…
New transiting planet candidates are identified in sixteen months (May 2009 - September 2010) of data from the Kepler spacecraft. Nearly five thousand periodic transit-like signals are vetted against astrophysical and instrumental false…
The Kepler mission has discovered over 2500 exoplanet candidates in the first two years of spacecraft data, with approximately 40% of them in candidate multi-planet systems. The high rate of multiplicity combined with the low rate of…
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…
In the blooming field of exoplanetary science, NASA's Kepler Space Telescope has revolutionized our understanding of exoplanets. Kepler's very precise and long-duration photometry is ideal for detecting planetary transits around Sun-like…