A Catalog of Kepler Habitable Zone Exoplanet Candidates

October 2016 • 2016ApJ...830....1K

Authors • Kane, Stephen R. • Hill, Michelle L. • Kasting, James F. • Kopparapu, Ravi Kumar • Quintana, Elisa V. • Barclay, Thomas • Batalha, Natalie M. • Borucki, William J. • Ciardi, David R. • Haghighipour, Nader • Hinkel, Natalie R. • Kaltenegger, Lisa • Selsis, Franck • Torres, Guillermo

Abstract • 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.

Links

• SIMBAD http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbo.pl?bibcode=2016ApJ...830....1K
• PDF https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/0004-637X/830/1/1/pdf
• PDF https://stacks.iop.org/0004-637X/830/1/pdf
• PREPRINT http://arxiv.org/abs/1608.00620
• DATA https://archive.stsci.edu/mastbibref.php?bibcode=2016ApJ...830....1K
• ELECTR https://doi.org/10.3847%2F0004-637X%2F830%2F1%2F1