Detecting Multiple Transiting Planets with the Kepler Mission

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy

Scientific paper

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Scientific paper

The Kepler Mission will be launched in 2008 to detect Earth-sized transiting planets orbiting solar-like stars over a four-year period. Given the prevalence of short period gas giant planets detected by ground-based radial velocity and transit photometry campaigns, we expect to see a large number of planetary systems in which there are multiple planets exhibiting transits. Naturally we wish to detect all such transiting planets and characterize them to the greatest extent possible with Kepler Mission data. We also expect the observation noise to be non-white so that it must be characterized to properly extract physical parameters of each planet and their associated uncertainties from the resulting light curves. Strong transits will perturb the noise characterization reducing the accuracy of the whitening filter in the neighborhood of the transits. The main effect with respect to transit detection is that the S/N of a strong transit will be reduced somewhat, although it will be detected easily. Once a transit signature is identified, we need to fit a model to it to determine the best-fit period, phase, depth, limb-darkening coefficient, inclination, etc. The approach we take to deal with this problem is to remove the current best estimate of the transit signature from the light curve at each step in order to allow for better characterization of the noise, followed by fitting the planetary parameters to the light curve whitened using the new noise characterization. This approach converges rapidly, allowing us to fit and remove each planet's signature from the light curve, thereby permitting us to detect any remaining planetary transit or reflected light signatures in the residual light curve.
This is funded by the Discovery Program Office, SMD.

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