A Pan-STARRS 1 study of the relationship between wide binarity and planet occurrence in the Kepler field

Abstract

The NASA Kepler mission has revolutionized time-domain astronomy and has massively expanded the number of known extrasolar planets. However, the effect of wide multiplicity on exoplanet occurrence has not been tested with this data set. We present a sample of 401 wide multiple systems containing at least one Kepler target star. Our method uses Pan- STARRS 1 and archival data to produce an accurate proper motion catalogue of the Kepler field. Combined with Pan-STARRS 1 SED fits and archival proper motions for bright stars, we use a newly developed probabilistic algorithm to identify likely wide binary pairs which are not chance associations. As byproducts of this we present stellar SED templates in the Pan-STARRS 1 photometric system and conversions from this system to Kepler magnitudes. We find that Kepler target stars in our binary sample with separations above 6 arcsec are no more or less likely to be identified as confirmed or candidate planet hosts than a weighted comparison sample of Kepler targets of similar brightness and spectral type. Therefore we find no evidence that binaries with projected separations greater than 3000 au affect the occurrence rate of planets with P < 300 d around FGK stars.