Related papers: Identifying False Alarms in the Kepler Planet Cand…
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…
This thesis focuses on the detection of extrasolar planets via the transit method, and more specifically addresses issues relevant to the preparation of upcoming space missions such as CoRoT, Kepler, Eddington, aiming to detect terrestrial…
Recent developments in computational power and machine learning techniques motivate their use in many different astrophysical research areas. Consequently, many machine learning models have been trained to classify exoplanet transit signals…
In this work we empirically measure the detection efficiency of Kepler pipeline used to create the final Kepler Threshold Crossing Event (TCE; Twicken et al. 2016) and planet candidate catalogs (Thompson et al. 2018), a necessary ingredient…
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,…
Wide-field photometric transit surveys for Jupiter-sized planets are inundated by astrophysical false positives, namely systems that contain an eclipsing binary and mimic the desired photometric signature. We discuss several examples of…
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…
To date a dozen transiting "Tatooines" or circumbinary planets (CBPs) have been discovered, by eye, in the data from the Kepler mission; by contrast, thousands of confirmed circumstellar planets orbiting around single stars have been…
We present a method to confirm the planetary nature of objects in systems with multiple transiting exoplanet candidates. This method involves a Fourier-Domain analysis of the deviations in the transit times from a constant period that…
We present the results from a search of data from the first 33.5 days of the Kepler science mission (Quarter 1) for exoplanet transits by the Planet Hunters citizen science project. Planet Hunters enlists members of the general public to…
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…
We examine the role of instrumental systematics in the search for small amplitude signal components in the presence of large amplitude signals. Current analyses of variable stars dealing with the above situation seem to ignore the effects…
With each new version of the Kepler pipeline and resulting planet candidate catalogue, an updated measurement of the underlying planet population can only be recovered with an corresponding measurement of the Kepler pipeline detection…
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 Kepler Space Telescope has discovered thousands of planets via the transit method. The transit timing variations of these planets allows us not only to infer the existence of other planets, transiting or not, but to characterize a…
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…
We show that the claimed confirmed planet Kepler-452b (a.k.a. K07016.01, KIC 8311864) can not be confirmed using a purely statistical validation approach. Kepler detects many more periodic signals from instrumental effects than it does from…
Statistical analyses of large surveys for transiting planets such as the Kepler mission must account for systematic errors and biases. Transit detection depends not only on the planet's radius and orbital period, but also on host star…
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…
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…