Benjamin Montet - A Catalog of Transit Timing Posterior Distributions for all... - ERESS 2015

Benjamin Montet - A Catalog of Transit Timing Posterior Distributions for all Kepler Planet Candidate Events - ERESS 2015

Presented at the Emerging Researchers in Exoplanet Science Symposium 2015 on Friday, May 29th, 2015.
For more information and talk videos visit http://eres-symposium.org/.

Kepler has ushered in a new era of planetary dynamics, enabling the detection of interactions between multiple planets in transiting systems for hundreds of systems. These interactions, observed as transit timing variations, have been used to find non-transiting companions to transiting systems and to measure masses, eccentricities, and inclinations of transiting planets. Often, physical parameters are inferred by comparing the observed light curve to the result of a photodynamical model, a time-intensive process that often ignores the effects of correlated noise in the light curve. Catalogs of transit timing observations have previously neglected non-Gaussian uncertainties in the times of transit, uncertainties in the transit shape, and short cadence data. Here, we present a catalog of not only times of transit centers, but also posterior distributions on the time of transit for every transit event in the Kepler data, developed through importance sampling of each transit. This catalog allows us to marginalize over uncertainties in the transit shape and incorporate short cadence data, the effects of correlated noise, and non-Gaussian posteriors. Our catalog will enable dynamical studies that reflect accurately the precision of Kepler and its limitations without requiring the computational power to model the light curve completely with every integration.