KEPLER MISSION STELLAR AND INSTRUMENT NOISE PROPERTIES

By R. Gilliland, W. Chaplin, E. Dunham, V. Argabright, William J. Borucki, G. Basri, S. Bryson, D. Buzasi, Douglas A. Caldwell, Y. Elsworth and 7 more. 2011

212 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Kepler mission results are rapidly contributing to fundamentally new discoveries in both the exoplanet and asteroseismology fields. The data returned from Kepler are unique in terms of the number of stars observed, precision of photometry for time series observations, and the temporal extent of high duty cycle observations. As the first mission to provide extensive time series measurements on thousands of stars over months to years at a level hitherto possible only for the Sun, the results from Kepler will vastly increase our knowledge of stellar variability for quiet solar-type stars. Here, we report on the stellar noise inferred on the timescale of a few hours of most interest for detection of exoplanets via transits. By design the data from moderately bright Kepler stars are expected to have roughly comparable levels of noise intrinsic to the stars and arising from a combination of fundamental limitations such as Poisson statistics and any instrument noise. The noise levels attained by Kepler on-orbit exceed by some 50% the target levels for solar-type, quiet stars. We provide a decomposition of observed noise for an ensemble of 12th magnitude stars arising from fundamental terms (Poisson and readout noise), added noise due to the instrument and that intrinsic to the stars. The largest factor in the modestly higher than anticipated noise follows from intrinsic stellar noise. We show that using stellar parameters from galactic stellar synthesis models, and projections to stellar rotation, activity, and hence noise levels reproduce the primary intrinsic stellar noise features.

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, background): “The noise floor for Kepler data is often quoted as 15 parts per million (ppm) per six hours of observations (Gilliland et al. 2011).”
The Derivation, Properties, and Value of Kepler’s Combined Differential Photometric Precision (2012, background): “The noise is typically dominated by 1=f-type noise processes (where f is frequency) due to stellar variability and instrumental effects; for a thorough breakdown and discussion of the noise sources contributing to CDPP see Gilliland et al. (2011) and Van Cleve & Caldwell (2009).”
THE OCCURRENCE RATE OF SMALL PLANETS AROUND SMALL STARS (2013, background): “…will be required to detect Earth-size planets in the habitable zones of G dwarfs due to the higher-than-expected photometric noise due to stellar variability (Gilliland et al. 2011), but Kepler is already sensitive to the presence of Earth-size planets in the habitable zones of M dwarfs.”
THE TRANSITING EXOPLANET SURVEY SATELLITE: SIMULATIONS OF PLANET DETECTIONS AND ASTROPHYSICAL FALSE POSITIVES (2015, background): “Since photometry of saturated stars with Kepler has achieved the photon-counting limit (Gilliland et al. 2011), we assume that the systematic error is the same for the saturated stars and the unsaturated stars.”
The California-Kepler Survey. I. High-resolution Spectroscopy of 1305 Stars Hosting Kepler Transiting Planets (2017, methodology): “Also essential was the painstaking engineering behind the photometer (Caldwell et al. 2010; Gilliland et al. 2011; Bryson et al. 2010; Haas et al. 2010), as well as the software engineering that transformed CCD pixel values into planet candidates (Jenkins et al. 2010; Gilliland et al. 2010; Stumpe…”
Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) (2014, methodology): “The optical design was optimized to provide small image spots of a consistent size across the field of view (FOV), and produce undersampled images similar to those of Kepler.”
Optimized transit detection algorithm to search for periodic transits of small planets (2019, methodology): “…of the light curve is not part of TLS. Readers interested in detrending techniques are referred to the Savitzky & Golay (1964) filter (used by Gilliland et al. 2011), the median filter (Tal-Or et al. 2013), polynomial filters (Gautier et al. 2012; Rodenbeck et al. 2018), the Cosine Filtering…”
KEPLER-413B: A SLIGHTLY MISALIGNED, NEPTUNE-SIZE TRANSITING CIRCUMBINARY PLANET (2014, unknown): “Using Table 3 of Gilliland et al. (2011), for a contaminating star of Kp ≤ 18.5 mag (i.e. ∆Kp ≤ 3 mag), and interpolating for the galactic latitude of Kepler-413 of b = 17.47◦, we estimate the probability of a random alignment between a background source and Kepler-413 within an area of radius…”
TESS Eclipsing Binary Stars. I. Short-cadence Observations of 4584 Eclipsing Binaries in Sectors 1–26 (2021, methodology): “To estimate completeness qualitatively, we start with combined differential photometric precision (CDPP; Gilliland et al. 2011).”
EVEREST: PIXEL LEVEL DECORRELATION OF K2 LIGHT CURVES (2016, background): “Its unprecedented photometric precision allowed for the study of astrophysical signals down to the level of ∼ 15 parts per million (Gilliland et al. 2011), which has enabled the discovery of small planets in the habitable zones of their stars (e.g., Borucki et al. 2013; Quintana et al. 2014; Torres…”
TERRESTRIAL PLANET OCCURRENCE RATES FOR THE KEPLER GK DWARF SAMPLE (2015, background): “In Figure 4 we present the noise distribution of the selected GK dwarfs as a function of Kp. Gilliland et al. (2011) and Christiansen et al. (2012) discuss the instrumental and astrophysical sources of noise in the Kepler data.”