Princeton University Extrasolar Planet Discussion Group

One of the primary mission goals of the Kepler space telescope is to detect Earth-like terrestrial planets in the habitable zone around Sun-like stars and characterize their occurrence rate. Unfortunately, Earth-like planet candidates are at the detection limit so they are unreliable and few in number. Their occurrence rate estimates are therefore based on extrapolations from the other regions of the parameter space and come with a large uncertainty. I will (i) show how their significance can be more reliably estimated by the null signal template approach rather than the standard scrambling or inverting the dataset (ii) introduce a novel pipeline for planet detection and false alarm validation that drastically improves the false alarm filtering. I will then discuss the implications of these developments and reevaluate the status of known Earth-like planet candidates such as Kepler 452-b and Kepler 186-f. I will also show that the proposed methodology is more widely applicable, for example to TESS dataset and for periodograms and apply it to the search for supermassive black hole binaries, concluding that the proposed candidates are likely false alarms.