TRANSIT TIMING OBSERVATIONS FROM <i>KEPLER</i> . VIII. CATALOG OF TRANSIT TIMING MEASUREMENTS OF THE FIRST TWELVE QUARTERS

TLDR

Transit timing variations (TTVs) have been investigated in Kepler data, with prior work by Ford et al. and Steffen et al., and potential sources of apparent periodic TTVs include finite sampling and stellar activity such as spots. The study aims to derive statistics from the transit timing data to identify significant variations. Using pre‑search data conditioning light curves from the first twelve Kepler quarters, the authors derived transit timings for 1960 KOIs, measured durations and depths for 721 high‑SNR cases, and performed statistical analyses of the detected TTVs.

Abstract

Following Ford et al. (2011, 2012) and Steffen et al. (2012) we derived the transit timing of 1960 Kepler KOIs using the pre-search data conditioning (PDC) light curves of the first twelve quarters of the Kepler data. For 721 KOIs with large enough SNRs, we obtained also the duration and depth of each transit. The results are presented as a catalog for the community to use. We derived a few statistics of our results that could be used to indicate significant variations. Including systems found by previous works, we have found 130 KOIs that showed highly significant TTVs, and 13 that had short-period TTV modulations with small amplitudes. We consider two effects that could cause apparent periodic TTV - the finite sampling of the observations and the interference with the stellar activity, stellar spots in particular. We briefly discuss some statistical aspects of our detected TTVs. We show that the TTV period is correlated with the orbital period of the planet and with the TTV amplitude.