# Discovery and Vetting of Exoplanets I: Benchmarking K2 Vetting Tools

## TL;DR

This paper adapts and applies vetting algorithms from the Kepler mission to K2 data, producing a catalog of 772 exoplanet candidates with improved false positive identification and introducing an open-source pipeline for future missions.

## Contribution

It presents a new, uniformly-vetted catalog of K2 exoplanet candidates and introduces the DAVE pipeline for automated vetting of transit signals, adaptable for TESS data.

## Key findings

- Identified 676 planet candidates and 96 false positives in K2 data.
- Detected 60 new false positives, doubling known false positive signals.
- Most false positives show secondary eclipses or stellar companions.

## Abstract

We have adapted the algorithmic tools developed during the Kepler mission to vet the quality of transit-like signals for use on the K2 mission data. Using the four sets of publicly-available lightcurves on MAST, we produced a uniformly-vetted catalog of 772 transiting planet candidates from K2 as listed at the NASA Exoplanet archive in the K2 Table of Candidates. Our analysis marks 676 of these as planet candidates and 96 as false positives. All confirmed planets pass our vetting tests. 60 of our false positives are new identifications -- effectively doubling the overall number of astrophysical signals mimicking planetary transits in K2 data. Most of the targets listed as false positives in our catalog either show prominent secondary eclipses, transit depths suggesting a stellar companion instead of a planet, or significant photocenter shifts during transit. We packaged our tools into the open-source, automated vetting pipeline DAVE (Discovery and Vetting of Exoplanets) designed to streamline follow-up efforts by reducing the time and resources wasted observing targets that are likely false positives. DAVE will also be a valuable tool for analyzing planet candidates from NASA's TESS mission, where several guest-investigator programs will provide independent lightcurve sets -- and likely many more from the community. We are currently testing DAVE on recently-released TESS planet candidates and will present our results in a follow-up paper.