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Published October 10, 2016 | Submitted + Published
Journal Article Open

A Catalog of Kepler Habitable Zone Exoplanet Candidates

Abstract

The NASA Kepler mission ha s discovered thousands of new planetary candidates, many of which have been confirmed through follow-up observations. A primary goal of the mission is to determine the occurrence rate of terrestrial-size planets within the Habitable Zone (HZ) of their host stars. Here we provide a list of HZ exoplanet candidates from the Kepler Q1–Q17 Data Release 24 data-vetting process. This work was undertaken as part of the Kepler HZ Working Group. We use a variety of criteria regarding HZ boundaries and planetary sizes to produce complete lists of HZ candidates, including a catalog of 104 candidates within the optimistic HZ and 20 candidates with radii less than two Earth radii within the conservative HZ. We cross-match our HZ candidates with the stellar properties and confirmed planet properties from Data Release 25 to provide robust stellar parameters and candidate dispositions. We also include false-positive probabilities recently calculated by Morton et al. for each of the candidates within our catalogs to aid in their validation. Finally, we performed dynamical analysis simulations for multi-planet systems that contain candidates with radii less than two Earth radii as a step toward validation of those systems.

Additional Information

© 2016 American Astronomical Society. Received 2016 April 29; revised 2016 July 15; accepted 2016 July 18; published 2016 September 30. The authors would like to thank the anonymous referee, whose comments greatly improved the quality of the paper. The authors also thank Douglas Caldwell and Timothy Morton for enlightening discussions regarding Kepler candidate validation. Nader Haghighipour acknowledges support from NASA ADAP grant NNX13AF20G. James Kasting and Ravi Kopparapu gratefully acknowledge funding from the NASA Astrobiology Institute's lead team, supported by NASA under cooperative agreement NNH05ZDA001C. Ravi Kopparapu also acknowledges support from NASA Habitable Worlds grant NNH14ZDA001N-HW. Kepler is NASA's 10th Discovery Mission and was funded by the agency's Science Mission Directorate. This research has made use of the NASA Exoplanet Archive and the ExoFOP site, which are operated by the California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under the Exoplanet Exploration Program. This work has also made use of the Habitable Zone Gallery at hzgallery.org. The results reported herein benefited from collaborations and/or information exchange within NASA's Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS) research coordination network sponsored by NASA's Science Mission Directorate.

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Published - apj_830_1_1.pdf

Submitted - 1608.00620v2.pdf

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Created:
August 22, 2023
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October 20, 2023