Alexandre Santerne
Observatoire Astronomique Marseille-Provence

Abstract
The Kepler space mission, launched by NASA in March 2009, permit a great leap forward into the understanding of extrasolar planetary systems. By observing more than 156000 stars since 2009, this telescope already discovered more than 2300 transiting planet candidates.
Those candidates have an expected radii down to the size of the Earth or an orbital separation up to the habitable zone of their host star. I will present a brief review of Kepler results and discuss the difficulties of ground-based follow-up needed to validate and characterize those candidates. I will specially focus on the results based on our observations with the SOPHIE spectrograph at Haute-Provence Observatory (France) since mid-2010 that permit us to characterize more than 15 Kepler planets and brown dwarfs, and to measure the false positive rate of 35% for giant close-in planets.

2012 September 06, 13:30

IA/U.Porto
Centro de Astrofísica da Universidade do Porto (Auditorium)
Rua das Estrelas, 4150-762 Porto