Kepler Bonus: Aperture Photometry Light Curves of EXBA Sources

Abstract

Abstract NASA’s Kepler mission observed background regions across its field of view for more than 3 consecutive yr using custom designed superapertures (EXBA masks). Since these apertures were designed to capture a region of the sky rather than single targets, the Kepler Science Data Processing Pipeline produced target pixel files but did not produce light curves for the sources within these background regions. In this work, we produce light curves for 9327 sources observed in the EXBA masks. These light curves are generated using aperture photometry estimated from the instrument’s pixel response function (PRF) profile computed from Kepler's full-frame images. The PRF models enable the creation of apertures that follow the characteristic shapes of the point-spread function in the image and the computation of flux completeness and contamination metrics. The light curves are available at MAST as a high-level science product (kbonus-apexba). Alongside this data set, we present kepler-apertures, a Python library to compute PRF models and use them to perform aperture photometry on Kepler-like data. Using light curves from the EXBA masks, we found an exoplanet candidate around Gaia EDR3 2077240046296834304 consistent with a large planet companion with a 0.81 R J radius. Additionally, we report a catalog of 69 eclipsing binaries. We encourage the community to exploit this new data set to perform in-depth time domain analysis, such as eclipsing binaries demographics and other types of studies.