Long-period transiting exoplanets and their population
Dan Foreman-Mackey (University of Washington) 鈥� November 17, 2016
Abstract
The Kepler Mission has discovered thousands of exoplanets and revolutionized ourunderstanding of their population. This large, homogeneous catalog ofdiscoveries has enabled rigorous studies of the occurrence rate of exoplanetsand extra-Solar planetary systems as a function of their physical properties.Transit surveys like Kepler are most sensitive to planets with shorter orbitalperiods than the gas giant planets that dominate the dynamics of our SolarSystem. I have developed a fully-automated method of discovering andcharacterizing long-period transiting planets with only one or two transits inthe Kepler archival light curves. Since the method involves no humanintervention, I can also precisely measure the completeness function of thediscoveries and place constraints on the occurrence rate of exoplanets withorbital periods longer than 2 years. I will present this method and thestatistical tools developed as part of this project.
