Related papers: Demystifying Kepler Data: A Primer for Systematic …
We present evidence of tidally-driven inspiral in the Kepler-1658 (KOI-4) system, which consists of a giant planet (1.1$R_\mathrm{J}$, 5.9$M_\mathrm{J}$) orbiting an evolved host star (2.9$R_\odot$, 1.5$M_\odot$). Using transit timing…
The Kepler space mission, successfully launched in March 2009, is providing continuous, high-precision photometry of thousands of stars simultaneously. The uninterrupted time-series of stars of all known pulsation types are a precious…
In the exoplanetary era, the Kepler spacecraft is causing a revolution by discovering thousands of new planet candidates. However, a follow up program is needed in order to reject false candidates and to fully characterize the bona-fide…
With the loss of two reaction wheels, the period of Kepler's ultra-high precision photometric performance is at an end. Yet Kepler retains unique capabilities impossible to replicate from the ground or with existing or future space…
In the present era of large scale surveys, big data presents new challenges to the discovery process for anomalous data. Such data can be indicative of systematic errors, extreme (or rare) forms of known phenomena, or most interestingly,…
NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory is delivering vector field observations of the full solar disk with unprecedented temporal and spatial resolution; however, the satellite is in a highly inclined geostationary orbit. The relative…
We present the latest and most precise characterization of the architecture for the ancient ($\approx 11$ Gyr) Kepler-444 system, which is composed of a K0 primary star (Kepler-444 A) hosting five transiting planets, and a tight M-type…
The K2 mission will make use of the Kepler spacecraft and its assets to expand upon Kepler's groundbreaking discoveries in the fields of exoplanets and astrophysics through new and exciting observations. K2 will use an innovative way of…
Thanks to missions like Kepler and TESS, we now have access to tens of thousands of high precision, fast cadence, and long baseline stellar photometric observations. In principle, these light curves encode a vast amount of information about…
The Kepler space telescope leaves a legacy of tens of thousands of stellar rotation period measurements. While many of these stars show strong periodicity, there exists an even bigger fraction of stars with irregular variability for which…
Stellar surface processes represent a fundamental limit to the detection of extrasolar planets with the currently most heavily-used techniques. As such, considerable effort has gone into trying to mitigate the impact of these processes on…
A recent analysis of high precision photometry obtained using the Kepler spacecraft has revealed two surprising discoveries: (1) over 860 main sequence A-type stars -- approximately 40% of those identified in the Kepler field -- exhibit…
We present the discovery of the Kepler-19 planetary system, which we first identified from a 9.3-day periodic transit signal in the Kepler photometry. From high-resolution spectroscopy of the star, we find a stellar effective temperature…
The ~ 200,000 stars observed by the Kepler mission have provided unprecedented constraints across astrophysics. With the advent of modern spectroscopic and photometric surveys, new limits in stellar characterizations are within reach. In…
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…
Image restoration in astronomy has been considered a vital step in many ground-based observational programs that often suffer from sub-optimal seeing due to atmospheric turbulence, distortion of stellar shapes due to instrumental…
The Kepler mission has to date found almost 6,000 planetary transit-like signals, utilizing three years of data for over 170,000 stars at extremely high photometric precision. Due to its design, contamination from eclipsing binaries,…
Kepler seeks to detect sequences of transits of Earth-size exoplanets orbiting Solar-like stars. Such transit signals are on the order of 100 ppm. The high photometric precision demanded by Kepler requires detailed knowledge of how the…
From the moment astronomical observations are made the resulting data products begin to grow stale. Even if perfect binary copies are preserved through repeated timely migration to more robust storage media, data standards evolve and new…
This paper presents detailed consideration of methodologies to calibrate differential light curves for accurate physical starspot modeling. We use the Sun and starspot models as a testbed to highlight some factors in this calibration that…