In layman’s terms the Kepler Conjecture from 1611 is often phrased like “There is no way to stack oranges better than greengrocers do at their fruit stands” and one might add: all over the world and for centuries already. While it is not far from the truth this is also an open invitation to a severe misunderstanding. The true Kepler Conjecture speaks about infinitely many oranges while most gro...

Transiting planets have greatly expanded and diversified the exoplanet field. These planets provide greater access to characterization of exoplanet atmospheres and structure. The Kepler mission has been particularly successful in expanding the exoplanet inventory, even to planets smaller than the Earth. The orbital period sensitivity of the Kepler data is now extending into the Habitable Zones ...

KIC 8462852 is a superficially ordinary main sequence F star for which Kepler detected an unusual series of brief dimming events. We obtain accurate relative photometry of KIC 8462852 from the Kepler full-frame images, finding that the brightness of KIC 8462852 monotonically decreased over the four years it was observed by Kepler. Over the first ∼1000 days KIC 8462852 faded approximately linear...

High-resolution ground-based optical speckle and near-infrared adaptive optics images are taken to search for stars in close angular proximity to host stars of candidate planets identified by the NASA Kepler Mission. Neighboring stars are a potential source of false positive signals. These stars also blend into Kepler light curves, affecting estimated planet properties, and are important for an...

Kepler has detected numerous exoplanet transits by precise measurements of stellar light in a single visible-wavelength band. In addition to detection, the precise photometry provides phase curves of exoplanets, which can be used to study the dynamic processes on these planets. However, the interpretation of these observations can be complicated by the fact that visible-wavelength phase curves ...

Kepler is the newest GPU architecture from NVIDIA, and the GTX 680 is the first commercially available graphics card based on that architecture. Matrix multiplication is a canonical computational kernel, and often the main target of initial optimization efforts for a new chip. This article presents preliminary results of automatically tuning matrix multiplication kernels for the Kepler architec...

1 FWF-Start Project Y-192 “3D hp-Finite Elements”, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Altenbergerstraße 69, 4040 Linz, Austria [email protected] 2 Radon Institute for Computational and Applied Mathematics (RICAM), Altenbergerstraße 69, 4040 Linz, Austria [email protected] 3 Institute of Computational Mathematics, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Altenbergerstraße 69, 4040 Linz, Austria ulanger...

We propose a scientific program to complete a census of planets, characterizing their masses, orbital properties, and dynamical histories using continued observations of the Kepler field of view with the Kepler spacecraft in a two reaction wheel mission (subsequently referred to as Kepler-II). Even with a significantly reduced photometric precision, extending time-domain observations of this fi...

Hot Jupiters are expected to be dark from both observations (albedo upper limits) and theory (alkali metals and/or TiO and VO absorption). However, only a handful of hot Jupiters have been observed with high enough photometric precision at visible wavelengths to investigate these expectations. The NASA Kepler mission provides a means to widen the sample and to assess the extent to which hot Jup...

A re-purposed Kepler mission could continue the search for ∼Earth-sized planets in very short-period (≤ 1 day) orbits. Recent surveys of the Kepler data already available have revealed at least a dozen such planetary candidates, and a more complete and focused survey is likely to reveal more. Given the planets’ short orbital periods, building the requisite signal-to-noise to detect the candidat...