V torek, 3. marca 2026, bo ob 12. uri Astrodebata, ki jo bo vodil Jakob Robnik z UC Berkeley iz ZDA. Predavanje (v angleškem jeziku) bo v predavalnici F6. Vabljeni!
Videostreaming (and archive) available on the Astrodebata Youtube channel!
How common are Earth-like planet candidates?
Jakob Robnik
UC Berkeley, ZDA
One of the primary mission goals of the Kepler space telescope was 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 (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. I will also show that the proposed methodology is more widely applicable, and apply it to the TESS dataset and to the search for supermassive black hole binaries, concluding that the proposed candidates are likely false alarms.