Event

Ms. Sarah Sue Calbio will present her M.Phil. Seminar, titled “A Technique for Pre-selecting Transit Candidates from KEPLER,” on Thursday 25th February, 2010, at 11 am, at the FSA Physics Seminar Rm., 3rd Floor.

Abstract:

The Kepler space mission will monitor up to 170,000 stars continuously for 3.5 years to determine the frequency of Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone of dwarf stars. It will likely produce many hundreds of potential transit candidates that would require additional follow-up observations to determine whether they are planets or not. This list of candidates is expected to be dominated mainly by false positives that mimic the transit signature of planets. A new technique is presented that is suitable for segmenting the very large candidate list expected from Kepler, into high priority candidates and low priority candidates. This technique utilizes a candidate's period, transit duration and depth as well as its 2MASS colors. Results are shown for published candidate lists from the IRa01 and the LRc01 fields of the CoRoT space mission as well as published lists from the SuperWASP survey. For each of these candidate lists an average improvement of 60% has been obtained over current pre-selection methods.