Continuing work to identify planet occurrence rates as a function of stellar age, stellar type, and environment

[christinahedges]

Accurately measuring occurrence rates of exoplanets not only provides insight into the prevalence of Earth-like planets in the universe, but also allows us to better design future missions for planet characterization. While the occurrence rates of planets have been studied carefully by several teams using data from the original Kepler field (e.g. Burke et al. 2015; Mulders et al. 2018; Garrett et al. 2018, and references therein), planet occurrence rates are yet to be estimated in detail using the K2 data set. Interestingly, K2 provided access to a wider range stellar ages (e.g. Mann et al. 2017), later stellar types (e.g. Dressing et al. 2017), and different Galactic populations. The astrophysical diversity of the K2 data may reveal variability in the frequency of planets as a function of their environment. This, in turn, may inform planet formation models and future mission designs (see Kopparapu et al. 2018).

Moreover, while there have been numerous occurrence rate studies using the original Kepler data, its final Data Release 25 (DR25) planet catalog products have only recently become available and have thus only been utilized by a limited number of studies (Mulders et al. 2018; Narang et al. 2018; Petigura et. al 2018). DR25 is the first Kepler planet catalog to be accompanied by an accurate characterization of the detection reliability and completeness (Coughlin 2017; Thompson et al. 2018) and provides an important opportunity for improved occurrence rate studies. The associated documentation recently became easier to access via the new Kepler Data Products Overview page at the NASA Exoplanet Archive.