Targets of Note: Kepler-452 b

Affirming the validity of a Kepler planet involves two distinct criteria. The first is an assessment of whether the Kepler signal has a high INTERNAL probability of being a transit signal and not an instrumental or statistical anomaly. The second is an assessment of whether the candidate has a high EXTERNAL reliability against the possible sources of astronomical false positives; that is, non-planetary astrophysical phenomenon such as stellar variability and eclipsing binary stars have been rejected as the source of the transit event with a high degree of confidence. The first of these criteria references only the Kepler data while the second criterion takes into account other Kepler data and external follow-up observations.

Kepler-452 b was originally published as having both high internal and external reliability with the external probability that the planet is real being >99.73% (3-sigma) (Jenkins et al. 2015). Two recent papers (Mullally et al. 2018 and Burke et al. 2019) have called into question the internal reliability of the original results. The papers call attention to the pitfalls associated with the validation of low signal-to-noise events, i.e., the internal reliability.

For now, the Exoplanet Archive has opted to retain Kepler-452 b within the Confirmed Planets table until a more definitive refutation is published, but we have marked the planet as Controversial.

Last updated: 12 February 2019