New planetary and EB candidates from Campaigns 1-6 of the K2 mission

TL;DR

This paper presents a new pipeline for analyzing K2 mission data, identifying 172 planetary candidates and 327 eclipsing binaries by correcting for systematic noise and applying transit detection methods.

Contribution

The authors developed an optimized pipeline for K2 data that decorrelates systematic noise and detects planetary and binary candidates, expanding the catalog of potential exoplanets.

Findings

172 planetary candidates identified

327 eclipsing binary candidates identified

Maximum 6 ppm precision on 6-hour light curves

Abstract

With only two functional reaction wheels, Kepler cannot maintain stable pointing at its original target field and entered a new mode of observation called K2. Our method is based on many years of experience in planet hunting for the CoRoT mission. Due to the unstable pointing, K2 light curves present systematics that are correlated with the target position in the CCD. Therefore, our pipeline also includes a decorrelation of this systematic noise. Our pipeline is optimised for bright stars for which spectroscopic follow-up is possible. We achieve a maximum precision on 6 hours of 6 ppm. The decorrelated light curves are searched for transits with an adapted version of the CoRoT alarm pipeline. We present 172 planetary candidates and 327 eclipsing binary candidates from campaigns 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 of K2. Both the planetary candidates and eclipsing binary candidates lists are made public to promote follow-up studies. The light curves will also be available to the community.