Related papers: An Efficient Automated Validation Procedure for Ex…
We present a new method for confirming transiting planets based on the combination of transit timingn variations (TTVs) and dynamical stability. Correlated TTVs provide evidence that the pair of bodies are in the same physical system.…
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…
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…
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…
Transit searches provide a large number of planet candidates. Before attempting follow-up observations, the best effort should be spent in classifying the light-curves, rejecting false alarms and selecting the most likely ones for real…
One of the biggest challenges facing large transit surveys is the elimination of false-positives from the vast number of transit candidates. We investigate to what extent information from the lightcurves can identify blend scenarios and…
We present the results of a search through the photometric database of eclipsing Kepler binaries (Prsa et al. 2011; Slawson et al. 2011) looking for evidence of hierarchical triple star systems. The presence of a third star orbiting the…
We present Kepler exoplanet occurrence rates inferred with approximate Bayesian computation (ABC). By using the same planet catalogue, stellar sample, and characterization of completeness and reliability as Bryson et al. (2020), we are able…
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…
Asterodensity Profiling (AP) is a relatively new technique for studying transit light curves. By comparing the mean stellar density derived from the transit light curve to that found through some independent method, AP provides information…
We conducted a search for very short-period transiting objects in the publicly available Kepler dataset. Our preliminary survey has revealed four planetary candidates, all with orbital periods less than twelve hours. We have analyzed the…
A crucial step in planet hunting surveys is to select the best candidates for follow up observations, given limited telescope resources. This is often performed by human `eyeballing', a time consuming and statistically awkward process. Here…
Searches for planetary transits find many astrophysical false positives as a by-product. There are four main types analyzed in the literature: a grazing-incidence eclipsing binary star, an eclipsing binary star with a small radius companion…
This study presents a comprehensive evaluation of various classification algorithms used for the detection of exoplanets using labeled time series data from the Kepler mission. The study investigates the performance of six commonly employed…
We present an efficient analytical method to predict the maximum transit timing variations of a circumbinary exoplanet, given some basic parameters of the host binary. We derive an analytical model giving limits on the potential location of…
Context. In exoplanet searches with radial velocity data, the most common statistical significance metrics are the Bayes factor and the false alarm probability (FAP). Both have proved useful, but do not directly address whether an exoplanet…
We present a fast and efficient hybrid algorithm for selecting exoplanetary candidates from wide-field transit surveys. Our method is based on the widely-used SysRem and Box Least-Squares (BLS) algorithms. Patterns of systematic error that…
Transit search programs such as CoRoT and Kepler now have the capability of detecting planets as small as the Earth. The detection of these planets however requires the removal of all false positives. Although many false positives can be…
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission measured light from stars in ~75% of the sky throughout its two year primary mission, resulting in millions of TESS 30-minute cadence light curves to analyze in the search for…
The eccentricity distribution of exoplanets is known from radial velocity surveys to be divergent from circular orbits beyond 0.1 AU. This is particularly the case for large planets where the radial velocity technique is most sensitive. The…