Validation of Twelve Small Kepler Transiting Planets in the Habitable Zone

We report on the work to validate twelve candidate-transiting planets from Kepler with orbital periods ranging from 34 to 207 days initially identified in the pipeline search of three years of Kepler data from quarters 1 to 12. The candidates were selected based on pipeline Data Validation models indicating that they are small and potentially in the habitable zone (HZ) of their parent stars. As their expected Doppler signals are too small for a direct measure of their masses, we verify their planetary nature by validating them statistically using the BLENDER technique. BLENDER simulates large numbers of false-positive scenarios and compares the resulting light curves with the Kepler photometry, taking into account additional information from the analysis of Kepler flux centroids and new follow-up observations, including high-resolution optical and NIR spectroscopy, adaptive optics imaging, and speckle imaging. For eleven of the candidates we show that the likelihood they are true planets is far greater than that of a false positive, to a 99.73% confidence level. For the twelfth candidate, the planet confidence level is about 99.2%. Using improved stellar parameters for the host stars, we derive planetary radii ranging from 1.12 to 2.73 R_⊕. All twelve objects are confirmed to be in the HZ, and nine are small enough to be rocky. Excluding three of the candidates that have been previously validated by others, our study doubles the number of known potentially rocky planets in the HZ.