Planetary Candidates Observed by Kepler VI: Planet Sample from Q1-Q16 (47 Months)

TL;DR

This paper presents the sixth catalog of Kepler planet candidates, including 1493 new objects of interest, with a focus on low-radius planets and improved vetting of long-period candidates, enhancing the understanding of exoplanet demographics.

Contribution

It provides an updated, vetted catalog of Kepler planet candidates with improved detection and validation methods, especially for low signal-to-noise and long-period candidates.

Findings

1493 new KOIs identified, including 554 planet candidates

131 candidates have radii less than 1.5 Earth radii

Re-evaluation of long-period KOIs for consistency and reliability

Abstract

\We present the sixth catalog of Kepler candidate planets based on nearly 4 years of high precision photometry. This catalog builds on the legacy of previous catalogs released by the Kepler project and includes 1493 new Kepler Objects of Interest (KOIs) of which 554 are planet candidates, and 131 of these candidates have best fit radii <1.5 R_earth. This brings the total number of KOIs and planet candidates to 7305 and 4173 respectively. We suspect that many of these new candidates at the low signal-to-noise limit may be false alarms created by instrumental noise, and discuss our efforts to identify such objects. We re-evaluate all previously published KOIs with orbital periods of >50 days to provide a consistently vetted sample that can be used to improve planet occurrence rate calculations. We discuss the performance of our planet detection algorithms, and the consistency of our vetting products. The full catalog is publicly available at the NASA Exoplanet Archive.