Long-period transiting exoplanets and their population

Dan Foreman-Mackey (University of Washington)

November 17, 2016

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Abstract: The Kepler Mission has discovered thousands of exoplanets and revolutionized ourunderstanding of their population. This large, homogeneous catalog ofdiscoveries has enabled rigorous studies of the occurrence rate of exoplanetsand extra-Solar planetary systems as a function of their physical properties.Transit surveys like Kepler are most sensitive to planets with shorter orbitalperiods than the gas giant planets that dominate the dynamics of our SolarSystem. I have developed a fully-automated method of discovering andcharacterizing long-period transiting planets with only one or two transits inthe Kepler archival light curves. Since the method involves no humanintervention, I can also precisely measure the completeness function of thediscoveries and place constraints on the occurrence rate of exoplanets withorbital periods longer than 2 years. I will present this method and thestatistical tools developed as part of this project.