Kepler Object of Interest Network

During its four years of photometric observations, the Kepler space telescope detected thousands of exoplanets and exoplanet candidates. One of Kepler’s greatest heritages has been the confirmation and characterization of hundreds of multi-planet systems via Transit Timing Variations (TTVs). However, there are many interesting candidate systems displaying TTVs on such long time scales that the existing Kepler observations are of insufficient length to confirm and characterize them by means of this technique. To continue with Kepler’s unique work we have organized the “Kepler Object of Interest Network”(KOINet), a multi-site network formed by several telescopes spread among America, Europe and Asia. The goals of KOINet are to complete the TTV curves of systems where Kepler did not cover the interaction timescales well, to dynamically prove that some candidates are true planets (or not), to dynamically measure the masses and bulk densities of some planets, to find evidence for non-transiting planets in some of the systems, to extend Kepler’s baseline adding new data with the main purpose of improving current models of TTVs, and to build a platform that can observe almost anywhere on the Northern hemisphere, at almost any time. KOINet has been operational since March, 2014. Here we show some promising first results obtained from analyzing seven primary transits of KOI-0410.01, KOI-0525.01, KOI-0760.01, and KOI-0902.01 in addition to Kepler data, acquired during the first and second observing seasons of KOINet. While carefully choosing the targets we set demanding constraints about timing precision (at least 1 minute) and …