Identification of Background False Positives from Kepler Data

TL;DR

This paper presents new photometric data analysis techniques to identify background false positives in Kepler data, improving the reliability of exoplanet candidate identification.

Contribution

It introduces novel methods using only Kepler photometric data to distinguish background astrophysical false positives from true planetary signals.

Findings

Techniques effectively identify background transit sources.

Methods outperform previous approaches in false positive detection.

Approaches are applicable to large Kepler datasets.

Abstract

The Kepler Mission was launched on March 6, 2009 to perform a photometric survey of more than 100,000 dwarf stars to search for Earth-size planets with the transit technique. The reliability of the resulting planetary candidate list relies on the ability to identify and remove false positives. Major sources of astrophysical false positives are planetary transits and stellar eclipses on background stars. We describe several new techniques for the identification of background transit sources that are separated from their target stars, indicating an astrophysical false positive. These techniques use only Kepler photometric data. We describe the concepts and construction of these techniques in detail as well as their performance and relative merits.