Abstract
The NASA Kepler mission has discovered thousands of new planetary candidates,
many of which have been confirmed through follow-up observations. A primary
goal of the mission is to determine the occurrance rate of terrestrial-size
planets within the Habitable Zone (HZ) of their host stars. Here we provide a
list of HZ exoplanet candidates from the Kepler Data Release 24 Q1-Q17 data
vetting process. This work was undertaken as part of the Kepler Habitable Zone
Working Group. We use a variety of criteria regarding HZ boundaries and
planetary sizes to produce complete lists of HZ candidates, including a catalog
of 104 candidates within the optimistic HZ and 20 candidates with radii less
than two Earth radii within the conservative HZ. We cross-match our HZ
candidates with the Data Release 25 stellar properties and confirmed planet
properties to provide robust stellar parameters and candidate dispositions. We
also include false positive probabilities recently calculated by Morton et al.
(2016) for each of the candidates within our catalogs to aid in their
validation. Finally, we performed dynamical analysis simulations for
multi-planet systems that contain candidates with radii less than two Earth
radii as a step toward validation of those systems.
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