ALMOST ALL OF KEPLER'S MULTIPLE-PLANET CANDIDATES ARE PLANETS

By Jack J. Lissauer, G. Marcy, J. Rowe, S. Bryson, E. Adams, Lars A. Buchhave, D. Ciardi, W. Cochran, D. Fabrycky, Eric B. Ford and 14 more. 2012

237 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a statistical analysis that demonstrates that the overwhelming majority of Kepler candidate multiple transiting systems (multis) indeed represent true, physically associated transiting planets. Binary stars provide the primary source of false positives among Kepler planet candidates, implying that false positives should be nearly randomly distributed among Kepler targets. In contrast, true transiting planets would appear clustered around a smaller number of Kepler targets if detectable planets tend to come in systems and/or if the orbital planes of planets encircling the same star are correlated. There are more than one hundred times as many Kepler planet candidates in multi-candidate systems as would be predicted from a random distribution of candidates, implying that the vast majority are true planets. Most of these multis are multiple-planet systems orbiting the Kepler target star, but there are likely cases where (1) the planetary system orbits a fainter star, and the planets are thus significantly larger than has been estimated, or (2) the planets orbit different stars within a binary/multiple star system. We use the low overall false-positive rate among Kepler multis, together with analysis of Kepler spacecraft and ground-based data, to validate the closely packed Kepler-33 planetary system, which orbits a star that has evolved somewhat off of the main sequence. Kepler-33 hosts five transiting planets, with periods ranging from 5.67 to 41 days.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f75395d6c74385fa41e7fd05f358d5c131e1f555

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

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

In Instrumentation

1. D. Charbonneau
2. Timothy Morton
3. Jon Fortney
4. J. Winn
5. J. Owen
6. E. Gaidos
7. J. Southworth
8. J. Johnson

Citations in the corpus

• VALIDATION OF KEPLER'S MULTIPLE PLANET CANDIDATES. III. LIGHT CURVE ANALYSIS AND ANNOUNCEMENT OF HUNDREDS OF NEW MULTI-PLANET SYSTEMS (2014, background): “15 Lindheimer Fellow. multis observed thus implies a high reliability rate, as quantified by (Lissauer et al. 2012, 2013, henceforth Paper I and Paper II, respectively).”
• One of the closest exoplanet pairs to the 3:2 mean motion resonance: K2-19b and c (2015, background): “When two or more sets of transits are detected on the same target, their probability not to be planets significantly decreases (Lissauer et al. 2012; Lissauer et al. 2014).”
• A STUDY OF THE SHORTEST-PERIOD PLANETS FOUND WITH KEPLER (2014, background): “…shown that the false positive rate for a transit candidate that is found in association with other transit candidates of different periods around the sameKepler target is much lower than the false positive rate of a transit candidate that is found in isolation (Lissauer et al. 2012; Lissauer etal.”
• A NEARBY M STAR WITH THREE TRANSITING SUPER-EARTHS DISCOVERED BY K2 (2015, background): “…M dwarf systems are even more exciting, both because such candidates are extremely unlikely to result from astrophysical false positives (Lissauer et al. 2012) and because they allow for studies of comparative planetology (Muirhead et al. 2012) with identical initial conditions (i.e.,…”
• THE MASS OF KOI-94d AND A RELATION FOR PLANET RADIUS, MASS, AND INCIDENT FLUX (2013, methodology): “Low False Positive Rate in Multi-Planet Systems Lissauer et al. (2012) uses statistical arguments to calculate the false positive fraction in multi-planet systems.”
• The Exoplanet Population Observation Simulator. I. The Inner Edges of Planetary Systems (2018, background): “The large number of observed systems with multiple transiting planets indicate that planets are preferentially located in systems with small mutual inclinations (Lissauer et al. 2011, 2012; Fang & Margot 2012).”
• SOPHIE velocimetry of Kepler transit candidates XVII. The physical properties of giant exoplanets within 400 days of period (2015, background): “Note that among these 51 Spitzer targets, 33 of them are orbiting in multiple systems that are known to have a very low a-priori probability of being false positives (Lissauer et al. 2012, 2014).”
• The Gaia–Kepler Stellar Properties Catalog. I. Homogeneous Fundamental Properties for 186,301 Kepler Stars (2020, methodology): “The mass is in good agreement with Lissauer et al. (2012), but the radius is more than 1σ below the reported radius in Lissauer et al. (2012).”
• The California-Kepler Survey. I. High-resolution Spectroscopy of 1305 Stars Hosting Kepler Transiting Planets (2017, methodology): “In addition to planet catalogs produced by the Kepler team, detailed planet validation has been performed by Lissauer et al. (2012, 2014) on mulit-planet systems, and on large samples (1000’s) of KOIs by Mullally et al. (2015) and Morton et al. (2016).”
• The California-Kepler Survey. V. Peas in a Pod: Planets in a Kepler Multi-planet System Are Similar in Size and Regularly Spaced (2017, background): “The Kepler Mission (Borucki et al. 2010) has enabled detailed statistics of hundreds of coplanar multi-planet systems (Latham et al. 2011; Lissauer et al. 2011; Lissauer et al. 2012; Fabrycky et al. 2014; Lissauer et al. 2014; Rowe et al. 2014).”
• The Habitability of Planets Orbiting M-dwarf Stars (2016, background): “Statistical surveys indicate that ∼40% of discovered planetary candidates are part of multiple-planet systems (Rowe et al., 2014), and that their false-positive discovery probability is low, implying that these candidates are likely to be planets (Lissauer et al., 2012a, 2014).”
• THE FALSE POSITIVE RATE OF KEPLER AND THE OCCURRENCE OF PLANETS (2013, background): “For example, Lissauer et al. (2012) have recently shown that most KOIs with multiple candidates (‘multis’) are bonafide planets.”
• PLANETARY CANDIDATES OBSERVED BY KEPLER. III. ANALYSIS OF THE FIRST 16 MONTHS OF DATA (2012, background): “%) are bona fide planets (Lissauer et al. 2012).”
• LOW FALSE POSITIVE RATE OF KEPLER CANDIDATES ESTIMATED FROM A COMBINATION OF SPITZER AND FOLLOW-UP OBSERVATIONS (2015, methodology): “Eleven of these systems have been validated by Rowe et al. (2014) using statistical arguments from Lissauer et al. (2012, 2014) and Q1Q8 Kepler data.”