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Space TelescopesReprint (Version printed in journal)

A Catalog of Kepler Habitable Zone Exoplanet Candidates

Kepler20171 min read194 words
Stephen R Kane, Michelle L Hill, James F Kasting, Ravi Kumar Kopparapu, Elisa V Quintana, Thomas Barclay, Natalie M Batalha, William J Borucki, David R Ciardi, Nader Haghighipour, Natalie R Hinkel, Lisa Kaltenegger, Franck Selsis, and Guillermo Torres
2230 Support

The NASA Kepler mission ha s 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 occurrence 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 Q1–Q17 Data Release 24 data-vetting process. This work was undertaken as part of the Kepler HZ 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 stellar properties and confirmed planet properties from Data Release 25 to provide robust stellar parameters and candidate dispositions. We also include false-positive probabilities recently calculated by Morton et al. 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.


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