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A main goal of NASA's Kepler Mission is to establish the frequency ofpotentially habitable Earth-size planets (eta Earth). Relatively few suchcandidates identified by the mission can be confirmed to be rocky via dynamicalmeasurement of their mass. Here we report an effort to validate 18 of themstatistically using the BLENDER technique, by showing that the likelihood theyare true planets is far greater than that of a false positive. Our analysisincorporates follow-up observations including high-resolution optical andnear-infrared spectroscopy, high-resolution imaging, and information from theanalysis of the flux centroids of the Kepler observations themselves. Whilemany of these candidates have been previously validated by others, theconfidence levels reported typically ignore the possibility that the planet maytransit a different star than the target along the same line of sight. If thatwere the case, a planet that appears small enough to be rocky may actually beconsiderably larger and therefore less interesting from the point of view ofhabitability. We take this into consideration here, and are able to validate 15of our candidates at a 99.73% (3 sigma) significance level or higher, and theother three at slightly lower confidence. We characterize the GKM host starsusing available ground-based observations and provide updated parameters forthe planets, with sizes between 0.8 and 2.9 Earth radii. Seven of them(KOI-0438.02, 0463.01, 2418.01, 2626.01, 3282.01, 4036.01, and 5856.01) have abetter than 50% chance of being smaller than 2 Earth radii and being in thehabitable zone of their host stars.

Validation of small Kepler transiting planet candidates in or near the habitable zone