Institute for Advanced Study Informal Astrophysics Seminar

The Kepler survey has revolutionized the field of exoplanets by its discovery of thousands of transiting planet candidates. However, translating the Kepler discoveries into knowledge about the underlying demographics of exoplanets is a non-trivial task. My talk will focus on one aspect of this task---what to do about the problem of astrophysical false positives. I will describe a procedure I have developed to efficiently calculate Kepler false positive probabilities, and present some preliminary results of applying this procedure to all the Kepler candidates. I will also give a quick overview of several other ongoing projects I am pursuing related to Kepler and exoplanet demographics.