Photometry of stars from the K2 extension of NASA's Kepler mission is afflicted by systematic effects caused by small (few-pixel) drifts in the telescope pointing and other spacecraft issues. We present a method for searching K2 light curves for evidence of exoplanets by simultaneously fitting for these systematics and the transit signals of interest. This method is more computationally expensive than standard search algorithms but we demonstrate that it can be efficiently implemented and used to discover transit signals. We apply this method to the full Campaign 1 dataset and report a list of 36 planet candidates transiting 31 stars, along with an analysis of the pipeline performance and detection efficiency based on artificial signal injections and recoveries. For all planet candidates, we present posterior distributions on the properties of each system based strictly on the transit observables.
@article{arxiv.1502.04715,
title = {A systematic search for transiting planets in the K2 data},
author = {Daniel Foreman-Mackey and Benjamin T. Montet and David W. Hogg and Timothy D. Morton and Dun Wang and Bernhard Schölkopf},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1502.04715},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
Updated to ApJ accepted version. Code at https://github.com/dfm/ketu & LaTeX source at https://github.com/dfm/k2-paper