Planethunters: Kepler Q2 searchable star/planet spreadsheet now available!

Kepler-11 - a newly discovered system with six transiting planets!
Image credit: NASA/Tim Pyle

The Q2 Kepler data has been officially released, making at least another 90 days of data available! Now the planethunting community should be able to confirm or deny their discoveries more easily!

Quick summary of the news in case you missed it:

  • Kepler reveals 1200 new planet candidates – including 68 earth-sized planets, 5 of which are in their star’s habitable zone!
  • One system contains no less than SIX transiting planets!
  • Updated table of confirmed Kepler Discoveries, including the new 6-planet Kepler-11 system.

    The Kepler team have also released a scientific paper on the new planet candidates for anyone interested in the details (including lots of nice graphs showing the planet distributions too!).

    Most of the paper is made up of tables showing the stars and planets, but that’s rather hard to search through or do anything with… so I spent this morning turning that into an Excel spreadsheet! You can download this from the link below – the spreadsheet contains both Table 1 (star list) and Table 2 (planet list) from the paper. I also added the Kepler IDs for the stars from Table 1 to the planet list (these aren’t on the original Table 2), which makes it much more useful for planethunters wanting to track down specific systems!

    Download the Star and Planet Candidate list – Excel Spreadsheet

    The spreadsheet itself has four sheets in it – the first is the planet list, the second is the key to the planet list, the third is the star list, and the fourth is the key to the star list (I put the keys on separate pages so that they don’t get in the way of the data if you want to sort that).

    If you don’t have Excel, here is the Full planet list in .csv format, and the full star list in .csv format (note that these don’t include the keys – you’ll have to get those from the paper or the excel file). Right-click and select “Save As…” to save the files!

    EDIT (12th Feb ’11): I’ve added the Stellar Luminosity, as derived from the star’s Radius and Teff (using L=4.pi.R².sigma.T4) to the Star List sheet in the excel and csv files. Since this is a derived value, it’s only as accurate as the Radius and Teff. I’ve also added the Absolute (visual) Magnitude and the Distance to the star in lightyears (see key for details).

    Among the interesting things revealed by the table:

  • About half of the planets have Vetting flags of 3 or 4, which means that they are still a bit unlikely and their parameters are unconfirmed.
  • The smallest planet candidate is 0.6 earth radii – that’s about 3830 km, only slightly bigger than Mars!! (KID 3831053).
  • There are 158 planets listed that are 1.5 Earth radii or less! Though only 40 of those have a Vetting flag of 1 or 2.
  • The hottest star with a likely planet is KOI 368 (KID 6603043), with a Teff of 9034K. That’s probably a white A2 V star, with 1.77 solar masses, and a luminosity of about 21.3 Sols and an age of only 300-400 million years!
  • Things are a little crazy at the high end – there are 18 objects listed with radii greater than 2 Jupiter radii (22 Earth Radii)! If they’re real planets, they’re enormously oversized! Most (if not all) of these have Vetting flags of 3 or 4 though, so they may be revised in the future.

    There’s lots more interesting stuff to look at in there! Stay tuned for more – in my next blog post (which I’ll put up in the next couple of days), I’ll be describing how to extract the Q2 data from the FITS files from the MAST site.

  • 5 Replies to “Planethunters: Kepler Q2 searchable star/planet spreadsheet now available!”

    1. Wonderful! Thanks for making the spreadsheet. I was going to do the same but as usual you beat me to it 😉

      I had a quick look at Q1 and Q2 for 3831053 (the smallest planet) just to see how difficult it was to spot that – the star looks like your typical pulsating subgiant but there seem to be transits just by eyeballing – but are they too deep for a 0.6 Earth planet? And those giant spikes are very distracting.

      Then I checked the Kepler archive data and realized this star didn’t have a Teff and a radius. This was one of those unknown stars we could have scanned through.

      Q2 data needs a lot of preprocessing. The data pipeline is different from Q1. Just feels like the data is different. I don’t know how PH is going to handle those data breaks and glitches. Let’s hope they don’t make that 1.008 snafu like they did the last time.

    2. Yeah kianjin I agree with you on how PH is going to handle those data breaks and glitches in Q2, seems worse than Q1 but I suppose its to be expected with 3 times the data.

      1. I’m rather concerned about the idea of breaking up the data into 35-day chunks. It’s going to be hard to see repeating long-term patterns that way, that would be more visible if you could see all the data at once. But we’ll see what they do.

    3. I can’t post images up here, so I’ve added them to a discussion at the PH site: http://talk.planethunters.org/science/discussions/DPH1006o8d

      Take a look at the rather noisy light curve of 3831053 – if you gave me a random curve like that, I might throw up my hands in despair and may even miss those transits – hard to say.

      But yes, EDG, I think it might be better to see the data in one long dollop like that – I’ve changed my mind now on that ;-). Although it really depends. With a small screen, like my laptop, paged views work better. On my workstation with its gargantuan 27″, I like it long and stretchy…

    4. I agree with both of you that it would be great to see all the data on one graph but for analysis 35 days seems right, (small screen over here)
      A possible way to have our cake and eat it is to have an option at the end of the analysis to view the full 120 days, with the further ability to mark more transits on this.