CHARACTERISTICS OF PLANETARY CANDIDATES OBSERVED BY KEPLER. II. ANALYSIS OF THE FIRST FOUR MONTHS OF DATA

By William J. Borucki, D. Koch, G. Basri, N. Batalha, T. Brown, S. Bryson, Douglas A. Caldwell, J. Christensen-Dalsgaard, W. Cochran, E. Devore and 56 more. 2011

844 citations recorded by the source corpus.

On 2011 February 1 the Kepler mission released data for 156,453 stars observed from the beginning of the science observations on 2009 May 2 through September 16. There are 1235 planetary candidates with transit-like signatures detected in this period. These are associated with 997 host stars. Distributions of the characteristics of the planetary candidates are separated into five class sizes: 68 candidates of approximately Earth-size (Rp < 1.25 R⊕), 288 super-Earth-size (1.25 R⊕ ⩽ Rp < 2 R⊕), 662 Neptune-size (2 R⊕ ⩽ Rp < 6 R⊕), 165 Jupiter-size (6 R⊕ ⩽ Rp < 15 R⊕), and 19 up to twice the size of Jupiter (15 R⊕ ⩽ Rp < 22 R⊕). In the temperature range appropriate for the habitable zone, 54 candidates are found with sizes ranging from Earth-size to larger than that of Jupiter. Six are less than twice the size of the Earth. Over 74% of the planetary candidates are smaller than Neptune. The observed number versus size distribution of planetary candidates increases to a peak at two to three times the Earth-size and then declines inversely proportional to the area of the candidate. Our current best estimates of the intrinsic frequencies of planetary candidates, after correcting for geometric and sensitivity biases, are 5% for Earth-size candidates, 8% for super-Earth-size candidates, 18% for Neptune-size candidates, 2% for Jupiter-size candidates, and 0.1% for very large candidates; a total of 0.34 candidates per star. Multi-candidate, transiting systems are frequent; 17% of the host stars have multi-candidate systems, and 34% of all the candidates are part of multi-candidate systems.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. D. Charbonneau
2. Jon Fortney
3. Timothy Morton
4. J. Johnson
5. J. Winn
6. N. Madhusudhan
7. Sara Seager
8. G. Marcy

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. S. Basu
2. A. Serenelli
3. Jon Fortney
4. D. Charbonneau
5. E. Lopez
6. R. Kopparapu
7. J. Owen
8. Yanqin Wu

Citations in the corpus

• STELLAR AND PLANETARY PROPERTIES OF K2 CAMPAIGN 1 CANDIDATES AND VALIDATION OF 17 PLANETS, INCLUDING A PLANET RECEIVING EARTH-LIKE INSOLATION (2015, background): “The Kepler telescope (Borucki et al. 2010) has led to a revolution in stellar and planetary astrophysics, with 7305 “objects of interest” and 4173 “planet candidates” discovered to date (Borucki et al. 2011a, 2011b; Batalha et al. 2013; Burke et al. 2014; Mullally et al. 2015; Rowe et al. 2015).”
• KEPLER-18b, c, AND d: A SYSTEM OF THREE PLANETS CONFIRMED BY TRANSIT TIMING VARIATIONS, LIGHT CURVE VALIDATION, WARM-SPITZER PHOTOMETRY, AND RADIAL VELOCITY MEASUREMENTS (2011, methodology): “Planet frequencies in the appropriate radius range were taken as before from Borucki et al. (2011b).”
• The Disk Substructures at High Angular Resolution Project (DSHARP). II. Characteristics of Annular Substructures (2018, background): “Exoplanet surveys have uncovered remarkable diversity in the masses, radii, and composition of exoplanets, as well as in the overall architectures of exoplanetary systems (e.g., Howard et al. 2010; Borucki et al. 2011; Winn & Fabrycky 2015; Fulton et al. 2017).”
• KEPLER ECLIPSING BINARY STARS. II. 2165 ECLIPSING BINARIES IN THE SECOND DATA RELEASE (2011, background): “The culling criteria and the results are presented in detail by Borucki et al. (2011).”
• THE STATISTICS OF MULTI-PLANET SYSTEMS (2011, methodology): “At present, the Kepler data alone (Borucki et al. 2011) do not constrain the inclination distribution of multi-planet systems.”
• ALMOST ALL OF KEPLER'S MULTIPLE-PLANET CANDIDATES ARE PLANETS (2012, methodology): “The numbers derived in Section 2 suggest that the sample of multi-planet candidates identified by Borucki et al. (2011) is likely to include only a small fraction of false positives, of order 1%.”
• AN EFFICIENT AUTOMATED VALIDATION PROCEDURE FOR EXOPLANET TRANSIT CANDIDATES (2012, background): “As it turns out, many of the candidates from Borucki et al. (2011) were not in fact fully vetted.”
• MIGRATION THEN ASSEMBLY: FORMATION OF NEPTUNE-MASS PLANETS INSIDE 1 AU (2011, background): “In addition to the radial velocity surveys, the Kepler satellite has begun to release the contents of its large-scale transit catalog (Borucki et al. 2011; Lissauer et al. 2011b).”
• A PLATEAU IN THE PLANET POPULATION BELOW TWICE THE SIZE OF EARTH (2013, methodology): “The Kepler Mission has discovered an extraordinary sample of more than 2300 planets with radii ranging from larger than Jupiter to smaller than Earth (Borucki et al. 2011b; Batalha et al. 2012).”
• LACK OF INFLATED RADII FOR KEPLER GIANT PLANET CANDIDATES RECEIVING MODEST STELLAR IRRADIATION (2011, background): “Borucki et al. (2011) announced 165 giant planet candidates with 6R⊕ < RP < 15R⊕ and 19 candidates with 15R⊕ < RP < 22R⊕ for a total of 184 objects.”
• REVISED STELLAR PROPERTIES OF KEPLER TARGETS FOR THE QUARTER 1–16 TRANSIT DETECTION RUN (2013, background): “Examples of breakthrough discoveries in exoplanet science include more than 2700 new planet candidates (Borucki et al. 2011a,b; Batalha et al. 2013; Burke et al. 2013), measurements of planet densities in multi-planet systems through transit timing variations (Holman et al. 2010; Lissauer et al.…”
• ARCHITECTURE OF PLANETARY SYSTEMS BASED ON KEPLER DATA: NUMBER OF PLANETS AND COPLANARITY (2012, background): “For theKepler sample released by Borucki et al. (2011b), Morton & Johnson (2011) estimated that false positive probabilities were generally low at.”
• THE OCCURRENCE RATE OF SMALL PLANETS AROUND SMALL STARS (2013, background): “The inclusion of larger candidates in the Batalha et al. (2012) sample is an indication that the original Borucki et al. (2011) list was not complete at large planet radii and that continued improvements to the detection algorithm may result in further announcements of planet candidates with a…”
• HOW ROCKY ARE THEY? THE COMPOSITION DISTRIBUTION OF KEPLER’S SUB-NEPTUNE PLANET CANDIDATES WITHIN 0.15 AU (2014, background): “The Kepler Mission has found thousands of planetary candidates with sizes between that of Earth and Neptune (Rowe et al. 2014, in preparation; Burke et al. 2014; Batalha et al. 2013; Borucki et al. 2011).”
• FUNDAMENTAL PROPERTIES OF KEPLER PLANET-CANDIDATE HOST STARS USING ASTEROSEISMOLOGY (2013, positive): “The Kepler mission (Borucki et al. 2010a; Koch et al. 2010) has revolutionized exoplanet science in the last few years, yielding thousands of new exoplanet candidates (Borucki et al. 2011a, 2011b; Batalha et al. 2013).”
• TERRESTRIAL PLANET OCCURRENCE RATES FOR THE KEPLER GK DWARF SAMPLE (2015, methodology): “…assume the theoretical performance of the Transiting Planet Search algorithm (TPS Jenkins 2002) with a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) threshold of 7.1 (Borucki et al. 2011b), designate a higher SNR level where the planet sample is close to 100% complete 2 (Catanzarite & Shao 2011; Youdin 2011; Howard…”
• The Derivation, Properties, and Value of Kepler’s Combined Differential Photometric Precision (2012, background): “…changes in the stellar signal, which increases the scatter in the observations, and therefore the measured CDPP. Finally, Figures 6 and 7 show the detrended flux time series and CDPP times series respectively for target KIC 9390653, which is also identified as KOI 249 in Borucki et al. (2011a).”
• SPECTRO-THERMOMETRY OF M DWARFS AND THEIR CANDIDATE PLANETS: TOO HOT, TOO COOL, OR JUST RIGHT? (2013, background): “The Kepler mission (Borucki et al. 2010) has found more than 2000 planet candidates (Borucki et al. 2011; Batalha et al. 2013), enabling more robust studies of exoplanet statistics through large samples.”