Abstract
In the spring of 2009, the Kepler Mission commenced high-precision photometry on nearly 156,000 stars to determine the frequency and characteristics of small exoplanets, conduct a guest observer program, and obtain asteroseismic data on a wide variety of stars. On 15 June 2010 the Kepler Mission released data from the first quarter of observations. At the time of this publication, 706 stars from this first data set have exoplanet candidates with sizes from as small as that of the Earth to larger than that of Jupiter. Here we give the identity and characteristics of 306 released stars with planetary candidates. Data for the remaining 400 stars with planetary candidates will be released in February 2011. Over half the candidates on the released list have radii less than half that of Jupiter. The released stars include five possible multi-planet systems. One of these has two Neptune-size (2.3 and 2.5 Earth-radius) candidates with near-resonant periods.
Highlights
Kepler is a Discovery-class mission designed to determine the frequency of Earth-size planets in and near the habitable zone (HZ) of solar-type stars
The Transiting Planet Search (TPS) pipeline searches through each systematic error-corrected flux time series for periodic sequences of negative pulses corresponding to transit signatures
The false positives remaining in the 312 candidates should consist of background eclipsing binaries (BGEBs) closer to the target star than the preliminary vetting could detect, eclipsing binary (EB) missed in the preliminary light curve analysis, and triple systems harboring an EB
Summary
Kepler is a Discovery-class mission designed to determine the frequency of Earth-size planets in and near the habitable zone (HZ) of solar-type stars. At the one-year anniversary of the receipt of the first set of data from the beginning of science operations, the data for 156,097 stars covering these two periods are available to the public, apart from two exceptions: 400 stars held back to allow completion of one season of observations by the Kepler team, and 2778 stars held back for the Guest Observers and Asteroseismic Science Consortium (KASC). These data will be released on 2011 February 1, and in 2010 November when the proprietary period is complete, respectively.
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