Detection of Potential Transit Signals in 17 Quarters of Kepler Mission Data

TL;DR

This paper reports a comprehensive search for transit signals in 17 quarters of Kepler data, identifying thousands of potential planetary candidates, including new small planets in habitable zones, with a high recovery rate of known signals.

Contribution

It introduces a new transit detection pipeline applied to the full Kepler dataset, revealing numerous potential planets and validating the effectiveness of the method.

Findings

Detected 12,669 targets with potential transit signals.

Identified 20,367 transit-like signatures including multiple planet systems.

Achieved a 90.3% recovery rate of known transiting planets.

Abstract

We present the results of a search for potential transit signals in the full 17-quarter data set collected during Kepler's primary mission that ended on May 11, 2013, due to the on-board failure of a second reaction wheel needed to maintain high precision, fixed, pointing. The search includes a total of 198,646 targets, of which 112,001 were observed in every quarter and 86,645 were observed in a subset of the 17 quarters. We find a total of 12,669 targets that contain at least one signal that meets our detection criteria: periodicity of the signal, a minimum of three transit events, an acceptable signal-to-noise ratio, and four consistency tests that suppress false positives. Each target containing at least one transit-like pulse sequence is searched repeatedly for other signals that meet the detection criteria, indicating a multiple planet system. This multiple planet search adds an additional 7,698 transit-like signatures for a total of 20,367. Comparison of this set of detected signals with a set of known and vetted transiting planet signatures in the Kepler field of view shows that the recovery rate of the search is 90.3%. We review ensemble properties of the detected signals and present various metrics useful in validating these potential planetary signals. We highlight previously undetected planetary candidates, including several small potential planets in the habitable zone of their host stars.