A CATALOG of KEPLER HABITABLE ZONE EXOPLANET CANDIDATES

  • Stephen R. Kane
  • , Michelle L. Hill
  • , James F. Kasting
  • , Ravi Kumar Kopparapu
  • , Elisa V. Quintana
  • , Thomas Barclay
  • , Natalie M. Batalha
  • , William J. Borucki
  • , David R. Ciardi
  • , Nader Haghighipour
  • , Natalie R. Hinkel
  • , Lisa Kaltenegger
  • , Franck Selsis
  • , Guillermo Torres

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

133 Scopus citations

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.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number1
JournalAstrophysical Journal
Volume830
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 10 2016

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Astronomy and Astrophysics
  • Space and Planetary Science

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