Stellar statistics along the ecliptic and the impact on the K2 mission concept

Abstract

K2 is the mission concept for a repurposed Kepler mission that uses two reaction wheels to maintain the satellite attitude and provide ~85 days of coverage for ten 105-deg^2 fields along the ecliptic in the first 2.5 years of operation. We examine stellar populations based on the improved Besancon model of the Galaxy, comment on the general properties for the entire ecliptic plane, and provide stellar occurrence rates in the first 6 tentative K2 campaigns grouped by spectral type and luminosity class. For each campaign we distinguish between main sequence stars and giants and provide their density profile as a function of galactic latitude. We introduce the crowding metric that serves for optimized target selection across the campaigns. For all main sequence stars we compute the expected planetary occurrence rates for three planet sizes: 2-4 REarth, 4-8 REarth, and 8-32 REarth with orbital periods up to 50 days. In conjunction with Gaia and the upcoming TESS and Plato missions, K2 will become a gold mine for stellar and planetary astrophysics.

arXiv comment14 pages, 5 figures, 3 tables; submitted

References in corpus (24)

• A Survey of Stellar Families: Multiplicity of Solar-Type Stars
• Planet Occurrence within 0.25 AU of Solar-type Stars from Kepler
• The false positive rate of Kepler and the occurrence of planets
• Planetary Candidates Observed by Kepler, III: Analysis of the First 16 Months of Data
• Modelling the Galactic Interstellar Extinction Distribution in Three Dimensions
• The Occurrence and Mass Distribution of Close-in Super-Earths, Neptunes, and Jupiters
• Star counts in the Galaxy. Simulating from very deep to very shallow photometric surveys with the TRILEGAL code
• Kepler Eclipsing Binary Stars. I. Catalog and Principal Characterization of 1879 Eclipsing Binaries in the First Data Release
• Validation of Kepler's Multiple Planet Candidates. III: Light Curve Analysis & Announcement of Hundreds of New Multi-planet Systems
• Kepler Eclipsing Binary Stars. II. 2165 Eclipsing Binaries in the Second Data Release
• Fundamental Properties of Kepler Planet-Candidate Host Stars using Asteroseismology
• Galaxia: a code to generate a synthetic survey of the Milky Way
• Ensemble Asteroseismology of Solar-Type Stars with the NASA Kepler Mission
• Science performance of Gaia, ESA's space-astrometry mission
• Modeling Kepler transit light curves as false positives: Rejection of blend scenarios for Kepler-9, and validation of Kepler-9d, a super-Earth-size planet in a multiple system
• Stellar populations in the Milky Way bulge region : Towards solving the Galactic bulge and bar shapes using 2MASS data
• On the Low False Positive Probabilities of Kepler Planet Candidates
• Planetary Candidates Observed by Kepler IV: Planet Sample From Q1-Q8 (22 Months)
• Inferring the eccentricity distribution
• The Besancon Galaxy model renewed I. Constraints on the local star formation history from Tycho data
• Fast Rise of "Neptune-Size" Planets ($4-8R_{\mathrm{Earth}}$) from $P\sim 10$ to $\sim 250$ days -- Statistics of Kepler Planet Candidates Up to $\sim 0.75\mathrm{AU}$
• Probing populations of red giants in the galactic disk with CoRoT
• The Milky Way's external disc constrained by 2MASS star counts
• Red Giants in Eclipsing Binary and Multiple-Star Systems: Modeling and Asteroseismic Analysis of 70 Candidates from Kepler Data

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Kepler Eclipsing Binary Stars. VII. The Catalog of Eclipsing Binaries Found in the Entire Kepler Data-Set