Exoplanets & Exomoons

Searching the Entirety of Kepler Data: 17 New Planet Candidates Including 1 Habitable Zone World

By Keith Cowing
Press Release
astro-ph.EP
March 10, 2020
Filed under
Searching the Entirety of Kepler Data: 17 New Planet Candidates Including 1 Habitable Zone World
Exoplanet

We present the results of an independent search of all ~200,000 stars observed over the four year Kepler mission (Q1-Q17) for multiplanet systems, using a three-transit minimum detection criteria to search orbital periods up to hundreds of days.

We incorporate both automated and manual triage, and provide estimates of the completeness and reliability of our vetting pipeline. Our search returned 17 planet candidates (PCs) in addition to thousands of known Kepler Objects of Interest (KOIs), with a 98.8% recovery rate of already confirmed planets.

We highlight the discovery of one candidate, KIC-7340288 b, that is both rocky (radius < 1.6 R⨁) and in the Habitable Zone (insolation between 0.25 and 2.2 times the Earth's insolation). Another candidate is an addition to the already known KOI-4509 system. We also present adaptive optics imaging follow-up for six of our new PCs, two of which reveal a line-of-sight stellar companion within 4''. Michelle Kunimoto, Jaymie M. Matthews, Henry Ngo
(Submitted on 9 Mar 2020)
Comments: 25 pages, 9 figures, published in The Astronomical Journal
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Journal reference: AJ, Volume 159, Number 3, ID 124, 2020
DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/ab6cf8
Cite as: arXiv:2003.04397 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2003.04397v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
Submission history
From: Michelle Kunimoto
[v1] Mon, 9 Mar 2020 20:23:03 UTC (2,368 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.04397
Astrobiology

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) 🖖🏻