150 New transiting planet candidates from Kepler Q1-Q6 data

TL;DR

This paper reports the discovery of 150 new transiting planet candidates and 7 single transit events from Kepler Q1-Q6 data, enhancing the catalog of small, short-period exoplanets and identifying potential false positives.

Contribution

It introduces an improved search method combining de-trending, trend filtering, and visual inspection, leading to new planet candidate detections in Kepler data.

Findings

Discovered 150 new planet candidates and 7 single transit events.

Recovered 82.5% of the previous KOI catalog.

Identified 40 false positives likely caused by blended eclipsing binaries.

Abstract

We have performed an extensive search for planet candidates in the publicly available Kepler Long Cadence data from quarters Q1 through Q6. The search method consists of initial de-trending of the data, applying the trend filtering algorithm, searching for transit signals with the Box Least Squares fitting method in three frequency domains, visual inspection of the potential transit candidates, and in-depth analysis of the shortlisted candidates. In this paper we present 150 new periodic planet candidates and 7 single transit events, 72 of which are in multiple systems. The periods of these planet candidates vary from $\sim$0.17\,day to $\sim$ 440\,day. 124 of the planet candidates have radii smaller than 3 \rearth. We recover 82.5% of the Batalha et al. (2012) KOI catalog. We also report 40 newly identified false positives---systems that look like transiting planets, but are probably due to blended eclipsing binaries. Our search improves the statistics in the short period and small planet radii parameter ranges.