Related papers: Kepler and the Kuiper Belt
We propose an ecliptic Deep Drilling Field that will discover some 10,000~small and faint Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) --- primitive rocky/icy bodies that orbit at the outside of our Solar System and uniquely record the processes of planetary…
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,…
Kuiper belt objects smaller than a few kilometers are difficult to observe directly. They can be detected when they randomly occult a background star. Close to the ecliptic plane, each star is occulted once every tens of thousands of hours,…
Stellar occultations have been used to search for Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud objects. We propose a search for interstellar objects based on the characteristic durations ($\sim 0.1 \mathrm{s}$) of their stellar occultation signals and high…
I show that the WFIRST microlensing survey will enable detection and precision orbit determination of Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) down to H_=28.2 over an effective area of about 17 sq.deg. Typical fractional period errors will be about 1.5%…
Kepler-13Ab (= KOI-13.01) is a unique transiting hot Jupiter. It is one of very few known short-period planets orbiting a hot A-type star, making it one of the hottest planets currently known. The availability of Kepler data allows us to…
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…
This paper reports the detection and the measurements of occultations of the two transiting hot giant exoplanets Kepler-5b and Kepler-6b by their parent stars. The observations are obtained in the near infrared with Spitzer Space Telescope…
We present the results of a search for potential transit signals in the first three quarters of photometry data acquired by the Kepler Mission. The targets of the search include 151,722 stars which were observed over the full interval and…
The Kepler mission's primary goal is the detection and characterization of Earth-like planets by observing continuously a region of sky for a nominal period of three-and-a-half years. Over 100,000 stars will be monitored, with a small…
One core goal of the Kepler mission was to determine the frequency of Earth-like planets that orbit Sun-like stars. Accurately estimating this planet occurrence rate requires both a well-vetted list of planets and a clear understanding of…
We present Kepler exoplanet occurrence rates for planets between $0.5-16$ R$_\oplus$ and between $1-400$ days. To measure occurrence, we use a non-parametric method via a kernel density estimator and use bootstrap random sampling for…
Almost all of the $>600$ known Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) have been discovered within 50 AU of the Sun. One possible explanation for the observed lack of KBOs beyond 50 AU is that the distant Kuiper belt is dynamically very cold, and thus…
This paper reports the discovery and characterization of the transiting hot giant exoplanet Kepler-17b. The planet has an orbital period of 1.486 days, and radial velocity measurements from the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) show a Doppler…
The Kepler mission has revolutionized our understanding of exoplanets, but some of the planet candidates identified by Kepler may actually be astrophysical false positives or planets whose transit depths are diluted by the presence of…
Observations of very low-mass stars with Kepler represent an excellent opportunity to search for planetary transits and to characterize optical photometric variability at the cool end of the stellar mass distribution. In this paper, we…
We show the effects of the perturbation caused by a passing by star on the Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) of our Solar System. The dynamics of the Kuiper belt (KB) is followed by direct $N$-body simulations. The sampling of the KB has been done…
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 downloaded…
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…
Microlensing and occultation are generally studied in the geometric optics limit. However, diffraction may be important when recently discovered Kuiper-Belt objects (KBOs) occult distant stars. In particular the effects of diffraction…