Title
Short-Period Kepler Exoplanets
Document Type
Student Presentation
Presentation Date
April 2017
Faculty Sponsor
Brian Jackson
Abstract
The Kepler Mission collected the light curves of hundreds of thousands of stars with the aim of finding transiting planets. Because Kepler’s goal was to find planets in the habitable zone, the model used to fit the transits was not built specifically with short-period (less than 1 day) planets in mind, and so several candidate planets with short periods were actually reported with the wrong periods. The goal of this project was to examine these Kepler planet candidates and note any discrepancies between the reported orbital period and the apparent orbital period based on the light curves. We found few orbital periods off by a factor of two and many other odd light curves in the process. Since the completion of this initial project, we have begun looking at light curves from the newer K2 Mission, an extension of the Kepler Mission. The focus of this project is to identify possible transiting planets in these new data.
Recommended Citation
Johnson, Samantha; Kreyche, Steven; and Adams, Elisabeth, "Short-Period Kepler Exoplanets" (2017). 2017 Undergraduate Research and Scholarship Conference.
https://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/as_17/22