1201.1892 (Eric B. Ford et al.)

Transit Timing Observations from Kepler: VI. Transit Timing Variation Candidates in the First Seventeen Months from Polynomial Models    [PDF]

Eric B. Ford, Darin Ragozzine, Jason F. Rowe, Jason H. Steffen, Thomas Barclay, Natalie M. Batalha, William J. Borucki, Stephen T. Bryson, Douglas A. Caldwell, Daniel C. Fabrycky, Thomas N. Gautier III, Matthew J. Holman, Khadeejah A. Ibrahim, Hans Kjeldsen, Karen Kinemuchi, David G. Koch, Jack J. Lissauer, Martin Still, Peter Tenenbaum, Kamal Uddin, William Welsh

Transit timing variations provide a powerful tool for confirming and characterizing transiting planets, as well as detecting non-transiting planets. We report the results an updated TTV analysis for 822 planet candidates (Borucki et al. 2011; Batalha et al. 2012) based on transit times measured during the first seventeen months of Kepler observations (Rowe et al 2012). We present 35 TTV candidates (4.1% of suitable data sets) based on long-term trends and 153 mostly weaker TTV candidates (18% of suitable data sets) based on excess scatter of TTV measurements about a linear ephemeris. We anticipate that several of these planet candidates could be confirmed and perhaps characterized with more detailed TTV analyses using publicly available Kepler observations. For many others, Kepler has observed a long-term TTV trend, but an extended Kepler mission will be required to characterize the system via TTVs. We find that the occurence rate of planet candidates that show TTVs is significantly increased (~60%-76%) for planet candidates transiting stars with multiple transiting planet candidate when compared to planet candidates transiting stars with a single transiting planet candidate.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.1892