Paper detail

Searching the Entirety of Kepler Data. I. 17 New Planet Candidates Including 1 Habitable Zone World

We present the results of an independent search of all ~200,000 stars observed over the four year Kepler mission (Q1-Q17) for multiplanet systems, using a three-transit minimum detection criteria to search orbital periods up to hundreds of days. We incorporate both automated and manual triage, and provide estimates of the completeness and reliability of our vetting pipeline. Our search returned 17 planet candidates (PCs) in addition to thousands of known Kepler Objects of Interest (KOIs), with a 98.8% recovery rate of already confirmed planets. We highlight the discovery of one candidate, KIC-7340288 b, that is both rocky (radius < 1.6 $R_{\bigoplus}$) and in the Habitable Zone (insolation between 0.25 and 2.2 times the Earth's insolation). Another candidate is an addition to the already known KOI-4509 system. We also present adaptive optics imaging follow-up for six of our new PCs, two of which reveal a line-of-sight stellar companion within 4''.