Cool Stars 14 - Submitted Abstract # 203
This version created on 05 October 2006

The Kepler Mission:  Terrestrial Exoplanets and Stellar Activity


Gibor Basri, UC Berkeley
Francisco Ramos-Stierle, UC Berkeley
Kurt Soto, UC Santa Barbara
Tristan Lewis, UC Berkeley
Ansgar Reiners, MPI fuer Sonnensystemforschung
William Borucki, NASA Ames Research Centers
David Koch, NASA Ames Research Center

Kepler is a NASA Discovery mission designed to determine the frequency
and distribution of Earth-sized planets within 1 AU of F-M main
sequence stars.  This is done by searching for planetary transits.
The mission will return up to 150,000  broad-band light curves with
unprecedented precision (20  micromag) and 30  minute resolution, that
are virtually continuous for several years.  Along with a program to
determine precise stellar parameters, the size and orbital distance of
the planets can be estimated, as well as the relations between planets
and the stars they orbit.  By the end, at least several hundred
terrestrial planets should be discovered if they are common.  A null
result would strongly imply that terrestrial planets are rare.  The
Kepler dataset is obviously also a treasure-trove of information on
stellar activity and rotation.  We have begun a research program to
understand and simulate stellar microvariability.  We start by trying
to understand the Sun as a microvariable star (cf.  the poster by Soto
et al.).  Having derived laws which govern continuum variability as a
function of magnetic configurations, we have also begun to determine
what utility these simulations might have.  Possibilities include
finding rotation periods (not always easy!), understanding the
appearance of stars viewed at different inclinations (can we actually
derive inclination?), extraction of magnetic distributions in
longitude and latitude, size- and time-scales for active regions and
starspots.  There will be an opportunity for Guest Investigators to
propose targets that are not part of the exoplanet search.  Kepler can
lead to a great leap in our understanding of the behavior of stellar
activity as a function of stellar mass and age.  

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