Updated Catalog of Kepler Planet Candidates: Focus on Accuracy and Orbital Periods

TL;DR

This paper presents an updated catalog of 4376 Kepler planet candidates emphasizing improved accuracy of planetary parameters and orbital periods, including considerations of transit timing variations and eccentricity correlations.

Contribution

It provides a new, more accurate catalog with uniformly derived properties and improved orbital period estimates, accounting for transit timing variations and eccentricity trends.

Findings

Many planets likely have long-period TTVs affecting ephemeris accuracy.

Eccentricities are anti-correlated with the number of transiting companions.

The catalog includes 4376 candidates, with detailed properties and considerations of TTVs.

Abstract

We present a new catalog of Kepler planet candidates that prioritizes accuracy of planetary dispositions and properties over uniformity. This catalog contains 4376 transiting planet candidates, including 1791 residing within 709 multi-planet systems, and provides the best parameters available for a large sample of Kepler planet candidates. We also provide a second set of stellar and planetary properties for transiting candidates that are uniformly-derived for use in occurrence rates studies. Estimates of orbital periods have been improved, but as in previous catalogs, our tabulated values for period uncertainties do not fully account for transit timing variations (TTVs). We show that many planets are likely to have TTVs with long periodicities caused by various processes, including orbital precession, and that such TTVs imply that ephemerides of Kepler planets are not as accurate on multi-decadal timescales as predicted by the small formal errors (typically 1 part in $10^6$ and rarely $ > 10^{-5}$) in the planets' measured mean orbital periods during the Kepler epoch. Analysis of normalized transit durations implies that eccentricities of planets are anti-correlated with the number of companion transiting planets. Our primary catalog lists all known Kepler planet candidates that orbit and transit only one star; for completeness, we also provide an abbreviated listing of the properties of the two dozen non-transiting planets that have been identified around stars that host transiting planets discovered by Kepler.