A Catalog of Kepler Habitable Zone Exoplanet Candidates

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive catalog of Kepler exoplanet candidates within the Habitable Zone, including detailed validation data and dynamical analysis to support future habitability studies.

Contribution

It provides the first extensive catalog of HZ exoplanet candidates from Kepler Data Release 24, with robust validation and dynamical analysis for small-radius candidates.

Findings

104 candidates within the optimistic HZ

20 candidates with radii less than two Earth radii in the conservative HZ

Inclusion of false positive probabilities for candidate validation

Abstract

The NASA Kepler mission has discovered thousands of new planetary candidates, many of which have been confirmed through follow-up observations. A primary goal of the mission is to determine the occurrance rate of terrestrial-size planets within the Habitable Zone (HZ) of their host stars. Here we provide a list of HZ exoplanet candidates from the Kepler Data Release 24 Q1-Q17 data vetting process. This work was undertaken as part of the Kepler Habitable Zone Working Group. We use a variety of criteria regarding HZ boundaries and planetary sizes to produce complete lists of HZ candidates, including a catalog of 104 candidates within the optimistic HZ and 20 candidates with radii less than two Earth radii within the conservative HZ. We cross-match our HZ candidates with the Data Release 25 stellar properties and confirmed planet properties to provide robust stellar parameters and candidate dispositions. We also include false positive probabilities recently calculated by Morton et al. (2016) for each of the candidates within our catalogs to aid in their validation. Finally, we performed dynamical analysis simulations for multi-planet systems that contain candidates with radii less than two Earth radii as a step toward validation of those systems.