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.
- Publication:
-
The Astrophysical Journal
- Pub Date:
- October 2016
- DOI:
- 10.3847/0004-637X/830/1/1
- arXiv:
- arXiv:1608.00620
- Bibcode:
- 2016ApJ...830....1K
- Keywords:
-
- astrobiology;
- astronomical databases: miscellaneous;
- planetary systems;
- techniques: photometric;
- Astrophysics - Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
- E-Print:
- 14 pages, 2 figures, 4 tables, accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal