Kepler Has Found 1,284 New Planets

Keith’s note: Just in case you missed this post last Wednesday.
NASA to Announce Latest Kepler Discoveries During Media Teleconference
“NASA will host a news teleconference at 1 p.m. EDT Tuesday, May 10 to announce the latest discoveries made by its planet-hunting mission, the Kepler Space Telescope. The briefing participants are: … Timothy Morton, associate research scholar at Princeton University in New Jersey …”
False Positive Probabilities for all Keper Objects of Interest: 1,284 Newly Validated Planets and 428 Likely False Positives
“We present astrophysical false positive probability calculations for every Kepler Object of Interest (KOI)the first large-scale demonstration of a fully automated transiting planet validation procedure. Out of 7056 KOIs, we determine that 1935 have probabilities <1% to be astrophysical false positives, and thus may be considered validated planets. 1284 of these have not yet been validated or confirmed by other methods. In addition, we identify 428 KOIs likely to be false positives that have not yet been identified as such, though some of these may be a result of unidentified transit timing variations. A side product of these calculations is full stellar property posterior samplings for every host star, modeled as single, binary, and triple systems. These calculations use vespa, a publicly available Python package able to be easily applied to any transiting exoplanet candidate."

Robo-AO Kepler Planetary Candidate Survey II: Adaptive Optics Imaging of 969 Kepler Exoplanet Candidate Host Stars
“We found 203 companions within ∼4″ of 181 of the Kepler stars, of which 141 are new discoveries. We measure the nearby-star probability for this sample of Kepler planet candidate host stars to be 10.6% ± 1.1% at angular separations up to 2.5″, significantly higher than the 7.4% ± 1.0% probability discovered in our initial sample of 715 stars; we find the probability increases to 17.6% ± 1.5% out to a separation of 4.0″.”