Detection of Potential Transit Signals in the First Three Quarters of Kepler Mission Data

TL;DR

This paper reports on a comprehensive search for potential exoplanet transit signals in the first three quarters of Kepler data, identifying thousands of candidates and validating the detection method's effectiveness.

Contribution

The study introduces a new transit detection pipeline applied to early Kepler data, successfully identifying known transits with high accuracy and providing a detailed catalog of potential signals.

Findings

Detected 5,392 potential transit signals meeting Kepler criteria.

Achieved 88.1% recovery rate of known transit events.

Transit depths mostly between 40 and 100 ppm, some below 10 ppm.

Abstract

We present the results of a search for potential transit signals in the first three quarters of photometry data acquired by the Kepler Mission. The targets of the search include 151,722 stars which were observed over the full interval and an additional 19,132 stars which were observed for only 1 or 2 quarters. From this set of targets we find a total of 5,392 detections which meet the Kepler detection criteria: those criteria are periodicity of the signal, an acceptable signal-to-noise ratio, and a composition test which rejects spurious detections which contain non-physical combinations of events. The detected signals are dominated by events with relatively low signal-to-noise ratio and by events with relatively short periods. The distribution of estimated transit depths appears to peak in the range between 40 and 100 parts per million, with a few detections down to fewer than 10 parts per million. The detected signals are compared to a set of known transit events in the Kepler field of view which were derived by a different method using a longer data interval; the comparison shows that the current search correctly identified 88.1% of the known events. A tabulation of the detected transit signals, examples which illustrate the analysis and detection process, a discussion of future plans and open, potentially fruitful, areas of further research are included.