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Published February 20, 2011 | Published
Journal Article Open

Characteristics of Kepler Planetary Candidates Based on the First Data Set

Abstract

In the spring of 2009, the Kepler Mission commenced high-precision photometry on nearly 156,000 stars to determine the frequency and characteristics of small exoplanets, conduct a guest observer program, and obtain asteroseismic data on a wide variety of stars. On 2010 June 15, the Kepler Mission released most of the data from the first quarter of observations. At the time of this data release, 705 stars from this first data set have exoplanet candidates with sizes from as small as that of Earth to larger than that of Jupiter. Here we give the identity and characteristics of 305 released stars with planetary candidates. Data for the remaining 400 stars with planetary candidates will be released in 2011 February. More than half the candidates on the released list have radii less than half that of Jupiter. Five candidates are present in and near the habitable zone; two near super-Earth size, and three bracketing the size of Jupiter. The released stars also include five possible multi-planet systems. One of these has two Neptune-size (2.3 and 2.5 Earth radius) candidates with near-resonant periods.

Additional Information

© 2011 American Astronomical Society. Received 2010 July 21; accepted 2010 December 13; published 2011 January 28. Kepler was competitively selected as the 10th Discovery mission. Funding for this mission is provided by NASA's Science Mission Directorate. Some of the data presented herein were obtained at the W.M. Keck Observatory, which is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation. The authors thank the many people who gave so generously of their time to make this mission a success.

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Created:
August 22, 2023
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October 23, 2023