Stellar and planetary properties of K2 campaign 1 candidates and validation of 17 planets, including a planet receiving Earth-like insolation

Benjamin T. Montet, Timothy D. Morton, Daniel Foreman-Mackey, John Asher Johnson, David W. Hogg, Brendan P. Bowler, David W. Latham, Allyson Bieryla, Andrew W. Mann

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    Abstract

    The extended Kepler mission, K2, is now providing photometry of new fields every three months in a search for transiting planets. In a recent study, Foreman-Mackey and collaborators presented a list of 36 planet candidates orbiting 31 stars in K2 Campaign 1. In this contribution, we present stellar and planetary properties for all systems. We combine ground-based seeing-limited survey data and adaptive optics imaging with an automated transit analysis scheme to validate 21 candidates as planets, 17 for the first time, and identify 6 candidates as likely false positives. Of particular interest is K2-18 (EPIC 201912552), a bright (K = 8.9) M2.8 dwarf hosting a 2.23 ± 0.25 planet with K and an orbital period of 33 days. We also present two new open-source software packages which enable this analysis. The first, isochrones, is a flexible tool for fitting theoretical stellar models to observational data to determine stellar properties using a nested sampling scheme to capture the multimodal nature of the posterior distributions of the physical parameters of stars that may plausibly be evolved. The second is vespa, a new general-purpose procedure to calculate false positive probabilities and statistically validate transiting exoplanets.

    Original languageEnglish (US)
    Article number25
    JournalAstrophysical Journal
    Volume809
    Issue number1
    DOIs
    StatePublished - Aug 10 2015

    Keywords

    • catalogs
    • planetary systems
    • planets and satellites: detection
    • stars: fundamental parameters

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • Astronomy and Astrophysics
    • Space and Planetary Science

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