K2 News and Results

Kepler/K2 has detected WASP-28 b. First planet detection in months.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24857-nasas-revived-exoplanethunter-sees-its-first-world.html#.UvQgk_ldWyU

Good idea. This thread will cover science results from the K2 mission. The original Kepler news and results thread(s) will be for science from the original three-wheel mission.

I must have missed something. Did the Kepler team go with a different approach? I seem to remember some sort of...'fixed look' option.

http://keplerscience.arc.nasa.gov/K2/index.shtml

« …K2 will perform a series of long, ecliptic-pointed campaigns to collect data for the astrophysical community that will inform their understanding of planet formation processes, young stars, stellar activity, stellar structure and evolution, and extragalactic science. With an estimated photometric performance of 80 ppm (6-hr S/N for a 12th mag G star), the K2 mission offers simultaneous observations of many objects at a precision at least five times better than is achievable from the ground. The proposed approximately 80-day observing periods enable a unique exoplanet survey which fills the gaps in duration and sensitivity between the Kepler and TESS missions, and offers pre-launch exoplanet target identification for JWST transmission spectroscopy… »

K2 will observe the M35 cluster continuously for 75 days.
http://www.tombarclay.com/blog/2014/03/k2-to-observe-m35-continuously-for-75-days/

Official approval for K2.

Kepler Mission Manager Update: K2 Has Been Approved!
http://www.nasa.gov/content/ames/kepler-mission-manager-update-k2-has-been-approved/#.U3Y_EPldUrU

First data from K2 for PlanetHunters.



http://blog.planethunters.org/2014/09/09/coming-soon/

K2 Campaign 1 data is on the ground. Campaign 2 underway.
http://www.nasa.gov/ames/kepler/mission-manager-update-c1-data-on-the-ground-c2-underway/

Reduced Light Curves from Campaign 0 of the K2 Mission
http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.1827

Available here.

The data's up on Planet Hunters!

Jupiter screws with the photometry for, say, 1 in a few stars. Other than that, the data is pretty much a somewhat less precise version of the K1 data, so get classifying!

http://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/docs/K2Numbers.html

K2 Confirmed Planet Naming Policy

Very good idea to naming that way K2- 1 ,2,3 itc. so we have now K2 1b and K2 2b,c,d

According to the NASA confirmed exoplanet overview, K2-1 b is WASP-28b and HIP 116454 b is K2-2 b.

Probably EPIC 201367065 will be K2-3, but so far it hasn't been added to the NASA Exoplanet Archive.

We report the FIRST planet discovery from the two-wheeled Kepler (K2) mission: HIP 116454 b. so wasp 28 b is not considered.

WASP-28 has already been given the designation K2-1, as you can see from the link.

Kepler-1, 2 and 3 follow the same logic.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.04715

A systematic search for transiting planets in the K2 data

Photometry of stars from the K2 extension of NASA's Kepler mission is afflicted by systematic effects caused by small (few-pixel) drifts in the telescope pointing and other spacecraft issues. We present a method for searching K2 light curves for evidence of exoplanets by simultaneously fitting for these systematics and the transit signals of interest. This method is more computationally expensive than standard search algorithms but we demonstrate that it can be efficiently implemented and used to discover transit signals. We apply this method to the full Campaign 1 dataset and report a list of 36 planet candidates transiting 31 stars, along with an analysis of the pipeline performance and detection efficiency based on artificial signal injections and recoveries. For all planet candidates, we present posterior distributions on the properties of each system based strictly on the transit observables.

Lazarus wrote:

Probably EPIC 201367065 will be K2-3, but so far it hasn't been added to the NASA Exoplanet Archive.

Yep, here it is.

KII - 3 would have been a more sensible designation !

Maybe KSM 3 b,c,d-kepler second mission

Or Chhogori-3?

http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.00692

One of the closest planet pairs to the 3:2 Mean Motion Resonance, confirmed with K2 observations and Transit Timing Variations : EPIC201505350

Our search through two separate pipelines led to the independent discovery of EPIC201505350, a two-planet system of Neptune sized objects (4.2 and 7.2 R), orbiting a K dwarf extremely close to the 3:2 mean motion resonance. The two planets each show transits, sometimes simultaneously due to their proximity to resonance and alignment of conjunctions.
Results. We obtain further ground based photometry of the larger planet with the NITES telescope, demonstrating the presence of large transit timing variations (TTVs) of over an hour. These TTVs allows us to confirm the planetary nature of the system, and place a limit on the mass of the outer planet of 386M eath.

Stellar and Planetary Properties of K2 Campaign 1 Candidates and Validation of 18 Systems, Including a Planet Receiving Earth-like Insolation

Quote :

The extended Kepler mission, K2, is now providing photometry of new fields every three months in a search for transiting planets. In a recent study, Foreman-Mackey and collaborators presented a list of 36 planet candidates orbiting 31 stars in K2 Campaign 1. In this contribution, we present stellar and planetary properties for all systems. We combine ground-based seeing-limited survey data and adaptive optics imaging with an automated transit analysis scheme to validate 18 candidates as planets and identify 6 candidates as likely false positives. Of particular interest is EPIC 201912552, a bright (K=8.9) M2 dwarf hosting a 2.24 \pm 0.25 Earth radius planet with an equilibrium temperature of 271 \pm 16 K and an orbital period of 33 days. We also present two new open-source software packages that enabled this analysis: isochrones, a flexible tool for fitting theoretical stellar models to observational data to determine stellar properties, and vespa, a new general-purpose procedure to calculate false positive probabilities and statistically validate transiting exoplanets.

Campaign 4 started. Includes part of the Hyades and Pleaides.
http://www.nasa.gov/ames/kepler/mission-manager-update-k2-in-campaign-4/

Check out this page for the current standings of field locations. It's fantastic to see additional field proposals, and I can only hope Kepler will be functioning a year in the future.

As I'm sure I don't have to explain, there's a lot of highly interesting bits of the sky to be observed over the next year or so. Campaigns 4 and 5 will be very interesting for stars and planets (the latter including Praesepe and M67, so these two campaigns observe 4 extremely interesting open clusters).