Transiting planet search in the Kepler pipeline
Jon M. Jenkins, Hema Chandrasekaran, Sean McCauliff, Douglas A. Caldwell, Peter Tenenbaum, Jie Li, Todd C. Klaus, Miles T. Cote, Christopher K. Middour · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2010
The Kepler Mission simultaneously measures the brightness of more than 160,000 stars every 29.4 minutes over a 3.5-year mission to search for transiting planets. Detecting transits is a signal-detection problem where the signal of interest is a periodic pulse train and the predominant noise source is non-white, non-stationary (1/f) type process of stellar variability. Many stars also exhibit coherent or quasi-coherent oscillations. The detection algorithm first identifies and removes strong oscillations followed by an adaptive, wavelet-based matched filter. We discuss how we obtain super-resolution detection statistics and the effectiveness of the algorithm for Kepler flight data.