Identification of Background False Positives from Kepler Data

By S. Bryson, Jon M. Jenkins, R. Gilliland, Joseph D. Twicken, B. Clarke, J. Rowe, Douglas A. Caldwell, N. Batalha, F. Mullally, M. Haas and 1 more. 2013

139 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Kepler Mission was launched on 2009 March 6 to perform a photometric survey of more than 100,000 dwarf stars to search for Earth-size planets with the transit technique. The reliability of the resulting planetary candidate list relies on the ability to identify and remove false positives. Major sources of astrophysical false positives are planetary transits and stellar eclipses on background stars. We describe several new techniques for the identification of background transit sources that are separated from their target stars, indicating an astrophysical false positive. These techniques use only Kepler photometric data. We describe the concepts and construction of these techniques in detail as well as their performance and relative merits.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

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Citations in the corpus

A SYSTEMATIC SEARCH FOR TRANSITING PLANETS IN THE K2 DATA (2015, methodology): “Centroid variations are feasible in K2 but must be treated differently than in the original Kepler mission where this effect was generally measured using difference imaging (Batalha et al. 2010; Bryson et al. 2013).”
AUTOMATIC CLASSIFICATION OF KEPLER PLANETARY TRANSIT CANDIDATES (2014, background): “Data validation also attempts to locate the actual source of the transits (Bryson et al. 2013) in order to determine if the actual transit signal is being induced by a source offset from the target star.”
PASTIS: Bayesian extrasolar planet validation. I. General framework, models, and performance (2014, methodology): “…2009) or by sensitivity curves obtained using adaptive optics (AO; e.g. Borucki et al. 2012; Guenther et al. 2013), or by the minimum distance from the star that the analysis of the centroid motion can discard (mainly in the case of Kepler candidates; see Batalha et al. 2010; Bryson et al. 2013).”
Prevalence of Earth-size planets orbiting Sun-like stars (2013, methodology): “Further vetting was performed by automatically assessing which light curves were consistent with theoretical models of transiting planets (10).”
A STUDY OF THE SHORTEST-PERIOD PLANETS FOUND WITH KEPLER (2014, methodology): “These gradients were multiplied by theKepler plate scale of 4 arcsec pixel−1 in order to estimate the location of the flux-variable source with respect to the center-of-light of the sources within the photometric aperture (Jenkins et al. 2010, Bryson et al. 2013).”
SOPHIE velocimetry of Kepler transit candidates XVII. The physical properties of giant exoplanets within 400 days of period (2015, background): “These false positives are mostly background eclipsing binaries (EBs) and background transiting planets that produce an in-transit astrometric signal, called centroid effect (Batalha et al. 2010; Bryson et al. 2013).”
A NEARBY M STAR WITH THREE TRANSITING SUPER-EARTHS DISCOVERED BY K2 (2015, methodology): “We subject targets passing this first step to an extensive battery of further tests which search for blends using an examination of centroid motions in and out of transit, difference imaging analyses, and construction of pixel correlation images (Bryson et al. 2013).”
PLANETARY CANDIDATES OBSERVED BY KEPLER. VI. PLANET SAMPLE FROM Q1–Q16 (47 MONTHS) (2015, background): “Bryson et al. (2013) describes the centroid vetting in considerable detail, and the approach has remained largely unchanged.”
LOW FALSE POSITIVE RATE OF KEPLER CANDIDATES ESTIMATED FROM A COMBINATION OF SPITZER AND FOLLOW-UP OBSERVATIONS (2015, methodology): “Jenkins et al. (2010) and Bryson et al. (2013) describe this technique.”
DISCOVERY AND VALIDATION OF Kepler-452b: A 1.6 R⨁ SUPER EARTH EXOPLANET IN THE HABITABLE ZONE OF A G2 STAR (2015, methodology): “Data validation performs two types of pixel-level centroid analysis (Bryson et al. 2013) to determine the location of the transit source relative to KIC8311864.”
The California-Kepler Survey. I. High-resolution Spectroscopy of 1305 Stars Hosting Kepler Transiting Planets (2017, background): “…candidates (Jenkins et al. 2010; Gilliland et al. 2010; Stumpe et al. 2012; Smith et al. 2012, 2016; Batalha et al. 2010a,b; Torres et al. 2011; Bryson et al. 2013; Christiansen et al. 2012, 2013, 2015, 2016; Thompson et al. 2015; McCauliff et al. 2015; Tenenbaum et al. 2013, 2014; Twicken et…”
CONTAMINATION IN THE KEPLER FIELD. IDENTIFICATION OF 685 KOIs AS FALSE POSITIVES VIA EPHEMERIS MATCHING BASED ON Q1–Q12 DATA (2014, methodology): “A thorough review of this technique is given by Bryson et al. (2013), and its application to eliminating FPs from planet candidate catalogs is shown in Borucki et al. (2011a), Borucki et al. (2011b), Batalha et al. (2013), Burke (2013), and Rowe (2014, in preparation).”
VALIDATION OF KEPLER'S MULTIPLE PLANET CANDIDATES. II. REFINED STATISTICAL FRAMEWORK AND DESCRIPTIONS OF SYSTEMS OF SPECIAL INTEREST (2014, background): “…meet all six requirements for the statistical analysis stated in Section 3 as well as the following additional criteria: (vii) Centroid analysis (Bryson et al. 2013) indicates that the location of the transit signal on the plane of the sky is coincident with that of the Kepler target star…”
They are small worlds after all: revised properties of Kepler M dwarf stars and their planets (2015, methodology): “Difference images were constructed by subtracting stacked in-transit images from stacked out-of-transit images, resulting in an image of the transit (see Bryson et al. 2013, for more information).”
FALSE POSITIVE PROBABILITIES FOR ALL KEPLER OBJECTS OF INTEREST: 1284 NEWLY VALIDATED PLANETS AND 428 LIKELY FALSE POSITIVES (2016, background): “That is, these scenarios do not account for the possibility that only a small fraction of the light from a nearby contaminating star might be in the aperture, many of which have already been identified via other methods Bryson et al. (2013); Coughlin et al. (2014).”
PLANETARY CANDIDATES OBSERVED BY KEPLER IV: PLANET SAMPLE FROM Q1–Q8 (22 MONTHS) (2013, methodology): “…offset being significant is sufficient for a false positive designation if a visual inspection of the target scene warrants concluding any of the underlying assumptions of the offset calculation are violated (see Bryson et al. 2013, for a thorough discussion of Kepler pixel-level data analysis).”
AN ANCIENT EXTRASOLAR SYSTEM WITH FIVE SUB-EARTH-SIZE PLANETS (2015, background): “However, for heavily saturated target stars such as Kepler-444, a centroid analysis is highly unreliable (Bryson et al. 2013).”