The Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope: Searching for Transiting Exoplanets in the Northern and Southern Sky

TL;DR

The KELT survey uses two wide-field telescopes in the northern and southern hemispheres to discover transiting exoplanets around bright stars, enabling easy follow-up observations and contributing to exoplanet science.

Contribution

This paper introduces the KELT survey's dual-telescope approach and summarizes its exoplanet discoveries and follow-up efforts, highlighting its unique capability to find bright-star exoplanets.

Findings

Multiple exoplanet candidates identified

Confirmed exoplanets orbit bright stars

Established a framework for future surveys

Abstract

The Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT) survey is a ground-based program designed to search for transiting exoplanets orbiting relatively bright stars. To achieve this, the KELT Science Team operates two planets facilities - KELT-North, at Winer Observatory, Arizona, and KELT-South, at the South African Astronomical Observatory. The telescopes used at these observatories have particularly wide fields of view, allowing KELT to study a large number of potential exoplanet host stars. One of the major advantages of targeting bright stars is that the exoplanet candidates detected can be easily followed up by small, ground-based observatories distributed around the world. This paper will provide a brief overview of the KELT-North and the KELT-South surveys, the follow-up observations preformed by the KELT Follow-up Collaboration, and exoplanet discoveries confirmed thus far, before concluding with a brief discussion of the future for the KELT program.