A SYSTEMATIC SEARCH FOR TRANSITING PLANETS IN THE K2 DATA

By Daniel Foreman-Mackey, B. Montet, David W. Hogg, Timothy Morton, Dun Wang, Bernhard Schölkopf. 2015

108 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Photometry of stars from the K2 extension of NASA’s Kepler mission is afflicted by systematic effects caused by small (few-pixel) drifts in the telescope pointing and other spacecraft issues. We present a method for searching K2 light curves for evidence of exoplanets by simultaneously fitting for these systematics and the transit signals of interest. This method is more computationally expensive than standard search algorithms but we demonstrate that it can be efficiently implemented and used to discover transit signals. We apply this method to the full Campaign 1 data set and report a list of 36 planet candidates transiting 31 stars, along with an analysis of the pipeline performance and detection efficiency based on artificial signal injections and recoveries. For all planet candidates, we present posterior distributions on the properties of each system based strictly on the transit observables.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Instrumentation, AI for Physical Sciences

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Citations in the corpus

Toward Causal Representation Learning (2021, background): “The application of [218] leads to the discovery of 36 planet candidates [71], of which 21 were subsequently validated as bona ﬁde exoplanets [172].”
Towards Causal Representation Learning (2021, background): “The application of [219] lead to the discovery of 36 planet candidates [70], of which 21 were”
Causality for Machine Learning (2019, methodology): “The planet turned out to be one that had been first been detected in our work (Foreman-Mackey et al., 2015, exoplanet candidate EPIC 201912552).”
STELLAR AND PLANETARY PROPERTIES OF K2 CAMPAIGN 1 CANDIDATES AND VALIDATION OF 17 PLANETS, INCLUDING A PLANET RECEIVING EARTH-LIKE INSOLATION (2015, methodology): “In Foreman-Mackey et al. (2015) only parameters directly observable from the K2 light curve itself were reported: the period, time of transit center, and transit depth.”
197 CANDIDATES AND 104 VALIDATED PLANETS IN K2's FIRST FIVE FIELDS (2016, background): “…binaries (LaCourse et al. 2015; Armstrong et al. 2016; David et al. 2016a), supernovae (Zenteno et al. 2015), large numbers of planet candidates (Foreman-Mackey et al. 2015; Adams et al. 2016; Vanderburg et al. 2016), and a growing sample of validated and/or confirmed planets (e.g., Vanderburg…”
K2 Variable Catalogue: Variable Stars and Eclipsing Binaries in K2 Campaigns 1 and 0 (2015, background): “Such variations can be seen in the Eigen lightcurves of Foreman-Mackey et al. (2015).”
THE K2 ECLIPTIC PLANE INPUT CATALOG (EPIC) AND STELLAR CLASSIFICATIONS OF 138,600 TARGETS IN CAMPAIGNS 1–8 (2015, background): “Early K2 science results include the discovery of exoplanets around bright GKM dwarfs (Crossfield et al. 2015; Vanderburg et al. 2015; Foreman-Mackey et al. 2015; Petigura et al. 2015), eclipsing binary stars (Armstrong et al. 2015; LaCourse et al. 2015), as well as the detection of pulsations…”
Characterization of the K2-18 multi-planetary system with HARPS: A habitable zone super-Earth and discovery of a second, warm super-Earth on a non-coplanar orbit (2017, methodology): “Montet et al. (2015) reported the detection of the HZ superEarth K2-18b originally proposed in the K2 light curve analysis of Foreman-Mackey et al. (2015).”
One of the closest exoplanet pairs to the 3:2 mean motion resonance: K2-19b and c (2015, background): “This process can leave systematic or instrumental noise in place (see Foreman-Mackey et al. 2015).”
SPITZER OBSERVATIONS CONFIRM AND RESCUE THE HABITABLE-ZONE SUPER-EARTH K2-18b FOR FUTURE CHARACTERIZATION (2016, methodology): “If we ignore our knowledge about the cosmic ray hit and include the outlier data point in our analysis of the K2 light curve, we find the radius ratio uncertainty to be 9 times larger consistent with 5.13%+0.56%−0.35% as reported by Foreman-Mackey et al. (2015).”
PLANETARY CANDIDATES FROM THE FIRST YEAR OF THE K2 MISSION (2015, methodology): “The 25th percentile transit depth of the 19 additional planets we detect is about 35% smaller than the 25th percentile transit depth of the 29 planets we detect in common with Foreman-Mackey et al. (2015), indicating that our pipeline is sensitive to shallow transits.”
EVEREST: PIXEL LEVEL DECORRELATION OF K2 LIGHT CURVES (2016, methodology): “We note that our method is similar to that of Foreman-Mackey et al. (2015) and Montet et al. (2015), who use the principal components of the variability among the full set of K2 campaign 1 light curves as “eigen light curve” regressors.”