Related papers: Kepler and the Kuiper Belt

The Kepler space mission is devoted to finding Earth-size planets in habitable zones orbiting other stars. Its large, 105-deg field-of-view features over 156,000 stars that are observed continuously to detect and characterize planet…

We initiated the Robo-AO Kepler Planetary Candidate Survey in 2012 to observe each Kepler exoplanet candidate host star with high-angular-resolution visible-light laser-adaptive-optics imaging. Our goal is to find nearby stars lying in…

The Kepler Mission began its 3.5-year photometric monitoring campaign in May 2009 on a select group of approximately 150,000 stars. The stars were chosen from the ~half million in the field of view that are brighter than 16th magnitude. The…

Detecting heat from minor planets in the outer solar system is challenging, yet it is the most efficient means for constraining the albedos and sizes of Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) and their progeny, the Centaur objects. These physical…

We numerically investigate the possibility that a close stellar encounter could account for the high inclinations of the Kuiper belt, as originally proposed by Ida, Larwood and Burkert, however we consider encounters with pericenters within…

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 report the discovery of planet Kepler-12b (KOI-20), which at 1.695\pm0.030 RJ is among the handful of planets with super-inflated radii above 1.65 RJ. Orbiting its slightly evolved G0 host with a 4.438-day period, this 0.431\pm0.041 MJ…

We have performed an ecliptic imaging survey of the Kuiper belt with our deepest and widest field achieving a limiting flux of m(g') = 26.4, with a sky coverage of 3.0 square-degrees. This is the largest coverage of any other Kuiper belt…

We present the results of a search for potential transit signals in the first three years of photometry data acquired by the Kepler Mission. The targets of the search include 112,321 targets which were observed over the full interval and an…

We have analyzed the first 3.75 years of data from TAOS, the Taiwanese American Occultation Survey. TAOS monitors bright stars to search for occultations by Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs). This dataset comprises 5e5 star-hours of…

The Kepler mission discovery of candidate transiting exoplanets (KOIs) enables a plethora of ensemble analysis of the architecture and properties of exoplanetary systems. We compare the observed transit durations of KOIs to a synthetic…

We have performed a survey of the Kuiper belt covering ~ 1/3 a square degree of the sky using Suprime-cam on the Subaru telescope, to a limiting magnitude of m(R)~ 26.8 (50% threshold) and have found 36 new KBOs. We have confirmed that the…

We present the discovery of three new Scattered Kuiper Belt Objects (SKBOs) from a wide-field survey of the ecliptic. This continuing survey has to date covered 20.2 square degrees to a limiting red magnitude of 23.6. We combine the data…

Euclid, which is primarily a dark-energy/cosmology mission, may have a microlensing component, consisting of perhaps four dedicated one-month campaigns aimed at the Galactic bulge. We show that such a program would yield excellent…

We perform a systematic search for atmospheric variability in short-period gas-giant planets (hot Jupiters) observed by the Kepler mission, by looking for temporal variability of their secondary eclipse depths. This is motivated by a recent…

Motivated by a desire to understand the size distributon of the Kuiper Belt, an observing program was conducted at the Mount Palomar 5-m telescope from 1994-1996. The observations consisted of follow-up observations of known objects (in…

We propose a Roman Space Telescope survey to investigate fundamental properties of the distant solar system in the region of the Kuiper Belt where object characteristics and the size distribution are inaccessible from any other telescope.…

We propose a new Kepler mission, called NEOKepler, that would survey near Earth's orbit to identify potentially hazardous objects (PHOs). To understand its surveying power, Kepler's large field of view produces an 'etendue' (A*Omega) that…

We report here on the discovery of stellar occultations, observed with Kepler, that recur periodically at 15.685 hour intervals, but which vary in depth from a maximum of 1.3% to a minimum that can be less than 0.2%. The star that is…

We present the results of a pencil-beam survey of the Kuiper Belt using the Keck 10-m telescope. A single 0.01 square degree field is imaged 29 times for a total integration time of 4.8 hr. Combining exposures in software allows the…