Kepler and the Search for Habitable Earths
William Cochran (Texas)
The Kepler spacecraft, launched in March 2009, is designed to detect
potentially habitable Earths around other stars by detecting the transits
of these planets across the disks of their parent stars. This requires
performing differential photometry to a precision of 20ppm on a sample
of 170,000 stars for a period of 3.5 years. We will discuss the
on-orbit performance of the Kepler photometer, and then present
scientific results from the first year of Kepler data. In addition
to several transiting planet systems, we will present observations of
transiting multi-planet systems and several other interesting objects.
