KeplerData Validation I—Architecture, Diagnostic Tests, and Data Products for Vetting Transiting Planet Candidates

Abstract

The Kepler Mission was designed to identify and characterize transiting planets in the Kepler Field of View and to determine their occurrence rates. Emphasis was placed on identification of Earth-size planets orbiting in the Habitable Zone of their host stars. Science data were acquired for a period of four years. Long-cadence data with 29.4min sampling were obtained for ∼200,000 individual stellar targets in at least one observing quarter in the primary Kepler Mission. Light curves for target stars are extracted in the Kepler Science Data Processing Pipeline, and are searched for transiting planet signatures. A Threshold Crossing Event is generated in the transit search for targets where the transit detection threshold is exceeded and transit consistency checks are satisfied. These targets are subjected to further scrutiny in the Data Validation (DV) component of the Pipeline. Transiting planet candidates are characterized in DV, and light curves are searched for additional planets after transit signatures are modeled and removed. A suite of diagnostic tests is performed on all candidates to aid in discrimination between genuine transiting planets and instrumental or astrophysical false positives. Data products are generated per target and planet candidate to document and display transiting planet model fit and diagnostic test results. These products are exported to the Exoplanet Archive at the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute, and are available to the community. We describe the DV architecture and diagnostic tests, and provide a brief overview of the data products. Transiting planet modeling and the search for multiple planets on individual targets are described in a companion paper. The final revision of the Kepler Pipeline code base is available to the general public through GitHub. The Kepler Pipeline has also been modified to support the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) Mission which is expected to commence in 2018.

Evolution of the Radius Valley around Low-mass Stars from Kepler and K2

“…The TESS primary mission-lasting one year-has been ongoing since July 2018. Based on the photometric performance of the mission and consequently on the success of planet searches by the Science Processing Operations Center (SPOC; Jenkins et al 2016;Twicken et al 2018;Li et al 2018) at the time of writing, we can estimate the number of low mass stars required to Note. -The rp boundaries on the radius valley are given implicitly by the upper rp limit on the rocky peak and the lower rp limit on the non-rocky peak.…”

A PSF-based Approach to TESS High quality data Of Stellar clusters (PATHOS) – I. Search for exoplanets and variable stars in the field of 47 Tuc

“…We analysed the centroid offset using the technique described by Twicken et al (2018). Briefly, we selected the images corresponding to the in-of-transit events and the images near the transit events (out-of-transit).…”

HD 213885b: a transiting 1-d-period super-Earth with an Earth-like composition around a bright (V = 7.9) star unveiled by TESS

“…The TESS alerts diagnostics, generated using the tools outlined in Twicken et al (2018), Jenkins et al (2016) and Li et al (2019) which have been adapted to work with TESS data, present this system as having a 1-day transit signal present in the data, which we refer to as TOI-141.01. The transit signature of this planet passes all the Data Validation (DV) tests (e.g., comparison of even and odd transits to screen against eclipsing binaries, ghost diagnostic tests to help rule out scattered light or background eclipsing binaries, among others) but the difference image centroiding test, likely due to the star being slightly saturated.…”

“…We thus conclude that no more significant transit-like signals are present in the BLS periodogram of our data. Possible additional signals in the photometry were also inspected using the Transiting Planet Search (TPS) within the SPOC Data Validation (DV) component, which as mentioned above has been recently adapted to work with TESS data (Twicken et al 2018;Jenkins et al 2016;Li et al 2019). No additional transiting planets were found with those tools either.…”