Two Thousand Kepler Phase Curves from Phasma

TL;DR

This paper extends the application of the phasma algorithm to analyze nearly 2000 Kepler exoplanet phase curves, providing a large, publicly available dataset to study planetary atmospheres and other effects.

Contribution

It applies the Fourier-based phasma method to a significantly larger sample of Kepler exoplanets, producing a comprehensive dataset of phase curves for community use.

Findings

1998 detrended phase curves released publicly

Extended the phasma algorithm to Kepler data

Provided a Python implementation of the method

Abstract

An exoplanet's optical phase curve constrains the thermal emission and albedo of the planet's surface and/or atmosphere, as well as potentially constraining the mass via gravitational influences on the host star. Recently, Jansen & Kipping (2018) demonstrated that exoplanets with precisely constrained orbital periods, as is typical of transiting planets, enable one to exploit a Fourier-argument to non-parametrically separate optical phase curves from long-term photometric time series in the presence of realistic noise structures. This algorithm, dubbed phasma, was applied to 477 confirmed exoplanets in the original paper. In this research note, we extend the sample to all non-false positive Kepler Objects of Interest with periods less than ten days. Our sample of 1998 detrended phase curves are made publicly available to help the community search for various effects. A Python port of the phasma code is also made available.