Robo-AO Kepler Survey IV: the effect of nearby stars on 3857 planetary candidate systems

Understand

We present the overall statistical results from the Robo-AO Kepler planetary candidate survey, comprising of 3857 high-angular resolution observations of planetary candidate systems with Robo-AO, an automated laser adaptive optics system.

• These observations reveal previously unknown nearby stars blended with the planetary candidate host star which alter the derived planetary radii or may be the source of an astrophysical false positive transit signal.
• In the first three papers in the survey, we detected 440 nearby stars around 3313 planetary candidate host stars.
• In this paper, we present observations of 532 planetary candidate host stars, detecting 94 companions around 88 stars; 84 of these companions have not previously been observed in high-resolution.