An Independent Search for Small Long-period Planets in Kepler Data I: Detection Pipeline

The unprecedented photometric precision of Kepler mission allows searching for Earth-like planets.

However, the current Kepler catalog exhibits insufficient reliability for long-period low signal-to-noise planets due to systematic false alarms caused by correlated and non-Gaussian noise. As a result, it remains hard to measure the occurrence rate of such planets.

We aim to obtain a more reliable catalog of small (Kepler MES≲12) long-period (50-500 days) planet candidates from Kepler data and use it to improve the occurrence rate estimate.

This work develops an independent search pipeline that takes into account noise non-Gaussianity and physical prior. It provides a tail-less background distribution with a rate of ∼1 false alarm per search for MES∼7.8. We demonstrate the increase in detection efficiency for MES of 7.5-9 and >4 transits due to the background distribution control.

We conducted a search on the entirety of Kepler data, applying permutation and injection procedures to calculate the probability of planetary origin for every candidate. The pipeline detected ∼50 candidate events with a high probability of originating from real planets, which will be presented in our future work.

Oryna Ivashtenko, Barak Zackay

Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
Cite as: arXiv:2501.03019 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2501.03019v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2501.03019
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Submission history
From: Oryna Ivashtenko
[v1] Mon, 6 Jan 2025 14:01:22 UTC (2,381 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.03019
Astrobiology,