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 language | English (US) |
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Article number | 25 |
Journal | Astrophysical Journal |
Volume | 809 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 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