Disentangling the Planetary and Stellar Components of Transit Light Curves

The difficulty in confirming Kepler planet candidates from the ground drives the creation of more sophisticated transit light curve analyses. These analyses attempt to isolate planetary effects on the light curve and determine important planet properties such as size, mass, albedo, and temperature. The out-of-transit planetary signals can be dominated by seemingly minor stellar effects such as star spots which are not accounted for in the Kepler data pipeline. Fast rotating host stars can cause undulations in the light curve and become entangled with planetary phase effects. We compare two methods to remove these stellar effects. In the first method, we model the stellar star spot signal. The second method requires the filtering out the stellar rotation signal indicated by star spots through Fourier decomposition. We present preliminary results on the effectiveness of these two methods.