Exploring Exoplanet Populations with NASA's Kepler Mission

TL;DR

The Kepler Mission has identified over 3,500 exoplanets, including 100 in habitable zones, providing valuable data on planet diversity, occurrence rates, and prevalence in our galaxy to support the search for habitable worlds.

Contribution

This paper reports on Kepler's progress in cataloging exoplanets, confirming their properties, and analyzing their populations, advancing understanding of planet occurrence and diversity.

Findings

Over 3,500 exoplanets identified in three years

High reliability (85-90%) of the exoplanet catalog

Small planets are particularly frequent in the galaxy

Abstract

The Kepler Mission is exploring the diversity of planets and planetary systems. Its legacy will be a catalog of discoveries sufficient for computing planet occurrence rates as a function of size, orbital period, star-type, and insolation flux. The mission has made significant progress toward achieving that goal. Over 3,500 transiting exoplanets have been identified from the analysis of the first three years of data, 100 of which are in the habitable zone. The catalog has a high reliability rate (85-90% averaged over the period/radius plane) which is improving as follow-up observations continue. Dynamical (e.g. velocimetry and transit timing) and statistical methods have confirmed and characterized hundreds of planets over a large range of sizes and compositions for both single and multiple-star systems. Population studies suggest that planets abound in our galaxy and that small planets are particularly frequent. Here, I report on the progress Kepler has made measuring the prevalence of exoplanets orbiting within 1 AU of their host stars in support of NASA's long-term goal of finding habitable environments beyond the solar system.