Empirical Inference

A systematic search for transiting planets in the K2 data

2015

Article

ei

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.

Author(s): Foreman-Mackey, D. and Montet, B.T. and Hogg, D.W. and Morton, T.D. and Wang, D. and Schölkopf, B.
Journal: The Astrophysical Journal
Volume: 806
Number (issue): 2
Year: 2015
Department(s): Empirical Inference
Research Project(s): Astronomy
Bibtex Type: Article (article)
DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/806/2/215
State: Published
URL: http://stacks.iop.org/0004-637X/806/i=2/a=215

BibTex 

@article{Foreman-Mackeyetal15,
  title = {A systematic search for transiting planets in the K2 data},
  author = {Foreman-Mackey, D. and Montet, B.T. and Hogg, D.W. and Morton, T.D. and Wang, D. and Sch{\"o}lkopf, B.},
  journal = {The Astrophysical Journal},
  volume = {806},
  number = {2},
  year = {2015},
  doi = {10.1088/0004-637X/806/2/215},
  url = {http://stacks.iop.org/0004-637X/806/i=2/a=215}
}