Exoplanets & Exomoons

A Catalog of Kepler Habitable Zone Exoplanet Candidates

By Keith Cowing
Press Release
astro-ph.EP
August 27, 2016
Filed under
A Catalog of Kepler Habitable Zone Exoplanet Candidates

The NASA Kepler mission has discovered thousands of new planetary candidates, many of which have been confirmed through follow-up observations. A primary goal of the mission is to determine the occurrance rate of terrestrial-size planets within the Habitable Zone (HZ) of their host stars. Here we provide a list of HZ exoplanet candidates from the Kepler Data Release 24 Q1-Q17 data vetting process.

This work was undertaken as part of the Kepler Habitable Zone Working Group. We use a variety of criteria regarding HZ boundaries and planetary sizes to produce complete lists of HZ candidates, including a catalog of 104 candidates within the optimistic HZ and 20 candidates with radii less than two Earth radii within the conservative HZ.

We cross-match our HZ candidates with the Data Release 25 stellar properties and confirmed planet properties to provide robust stellar parameters and candidate dispositions. We also include false positive probabilities recently calculated by Morton et al. (2016) for each of the candidates within our catalogs to aid in their validation. Finally, we performed dynamical analysis simulations for multi-planet systems that contain candidates with radii less than two Earth radii as a step toward validation of those systems.

Stephen R. Kane, Michelle L. Hill, James F. Kasting, Ravi Kumar Kopparapu, Elisa V. Quintana, Thomas Barclay, Natalie M. Batalha, William J. Borucki, David R. Ciardi, Nader Haghighipour, Natalie R. Hinkel, Lisa Kaltenegger, Franck Selsis, Guillermo Torres
(Submitted on 1 Aug 2016)

Comments: 14 pages, 2 figures, 4 tables, accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as: arXiv:1608.00620 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:1608.00620v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
Submission history
From: Stephen Kane
[v1] Mon, 1 Aug 2016 21:16:44 GMT (79kb)
http://arxiv.org/abs/1608.00620

Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Station Payload manager/space biologist, Away Teams, Journalist, Lapsed climber, Synaesthete, Na’Vi-Jedi-Freman-Buddhist-mix, ASL, Devon Island and Everest Base Camp veteran, (he/him) 🖖🏻