Initial Planet Candidates

Thank you so much for all your amazing work! The next data release is just around the corner so hopefully everyone is ready to find some more planets. Until then, we have some preliminary results from the sector one data.

Over the past month the science team has been working hard on putting together a list of some of the most promising planet candidates. We find these by carefully looking at the lightcurves where many of you marked planets in the same location. With a careful eye we filter out lightcurves that show eclipsing binaries or that have transit-like events due to systematic effects. We  can identify these by looking at features such as the shape and depth of the dips, as well as the time of the transit.

The candidates that withstand this initial filtering process have to go through a further screening before they can be promoted to be a high priority planet candidate. This screening involves looking at the variability of nearby stars, the depths of the alternating transits (if the lightcurve shows multiple transits), and stellar parameter of the host star.

So far, we have identified five high priority candidates, three of which are TCEs (you can see their lightcurves below). Even though these lightcurves have passed all of our tests up to this point, we cannot confirm that these transits are due to planets without further observations. As a next step we will, therefore, look to observe these targets with ground based telescopes in order to find out more about these fascinating systems.

We are very excited about these initial five candidates and look forward to finding many more as we finish looking through the sector one data. Stay tuned for more results!