Related papers: Kepler and the Kuiper Belt

Stellar magnetic activity, just like that of the Sun, manifests itself in the form of flares and spots on the surface of the star. In the solar case, the largest flares originate from large active regions. In this work, we present a study…

The Kepler Mission has discovered thousands of exoplanets and revolutionized our understanding of their population. This large, homogeneous catalog of discoveries has enabled rigorous studies of the occurrence rate of exoplanets and…

High-resolution ground-based optical speckle and near-infrared adaptive optics images are taken to search for stars in close angular proximity to host stars of candidate planets identified by the NASA Kepler Mission. Neighboring stars are a…

We report high precision photometry of three small and one larger Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) obtained with the Advanced Camera for Surveys onboard the Hubble Space Telescope (ACS/HST). The three small bodies are the smallest KBOs for which…

All transiting planet observations are at risk of contamination from nearby, unresolved stars. Blends dilute the transit signal, causing the planet to appear smaller than it really is, or produce a false positive detection when the target…

The Kepler Observatory offers unprecedented photometric precision (<1 mmag) and cadence for monitoring the central stars of planetary nebulae, allowing the detection of tiny periodic light curve variations, a possible signature of binarity.…

We describe analytical and numerical collisional evolution calculations for the size distribution of icy bodies in the Kuiper Belt. For a wide range of bulk properties, initial masses, and orbital parameters, our results yield power-law…

Kepler will monitor enough stars that it is likely to detect single transits of planets with periods longer than the mission lifetime. We show that by combining the Kepler photometry of such transits with precise radial velocity (RV)…

The Kepler mission and subsequent ground-based follow-up observations have revealed a number of exoplanet host stars with nearby stellar companions. This study presents speckle observations of 57 Kepler objects of interest (KOIs) that are…

We report the statistical detection (at the >99% confidence level) of a population of 28th magnitude objects exhibiting proper motions of ~1 arcsecond per hour at quadrature in deep HST/WFPC2 images. The drift directions imply a…

The Kepler Mission has provided unprecedented, nearly continuous photometric data of $\sim$200,000 objects in the $\sim$105 deg$^{2}$ field of view from the beginning of science operations in May of 2009 until the loss of the second…

The Kepler Mission revolutionized exoplanet science and stellar astrophysics by obtaining highly precise photometry of over 200,000 stars over 4 years. A critical piece of information to exploit Kepler data is its selection function, since…

Fewer than 20 transiting Kepler planets have periods longer than one year. Our early search of the Kepler light curves revealed one such system, Kepler-1654 b (originally KIC~8410697b), which shows exactly two transit events and whose…

We analyzed 3 years of data from the Kepler space mission to derive rotation periods of main-sequence stars below 6500 K. Our automated autocorrelation-based method detected rotation periods between 0.2 and 70 days for 34,030 (25.6%) of the…

The recently published Kepler mission Data Release 25 (DR25) reported on ~197,000 targets observed during the mission. Despite this, no wide search for red giants showing solar-like oscillations have been made across all stars observed in…

The LAMOST-Kepler (LK-) project was initiated to use the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) to make spectroscopic follow-up observations for the targets in the field of the Kepler mission. The Kepler field is…

We present a method to detect small atmospheric signals in Kepler's planet candidate light curves by averaging light curves for multiple candidates with similar orbital and physical characteristics. Our statistical method allows us to…

We report the discovery of an Earth-sized planet ($1.16\pm 0.19 R_\oplus$) in an 8.5-hour orbit around a late G-type star (KIC 8435766, Kepler-78). The object was identified in a search for short-period planets in the {\it Kepler} database…

In order to detect and characterise cold extended circumstellar dust originating from collisions of planetesimal bodies in disks, belts, or rings at Kuiper-Belt distances (30-50 AU or beyond) sensitive submillimetre observations are…

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,…