A Citizen Science Win
With all the news coverage about “Tatooine” orbiting two stars, we were very excited to learn that in that most wretched hive of scum and villainy, the Planet Hunters Talk site, citizen scientist kianjin spotted Kepler-16! Kianjin even figured out that it must be a planet orbiting a double star.
7 responses to “A Citizen Science Win”
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- - October 15, 2012
Planet Hunters 
Great job there Kianjin! ^^
1)Who were the PH’s that classified this object? The transits must have been marked by many….they are too obvious to have been missed by anyone. Why is this object not on our EB or planet candidates list? Was this one of the Q1 objects we classified?
2)Kianjin deserves to be listed as a co-author or at the very least acknowledged on any ensuing “Tatooine” papers for figuring out that this EB had a planetary transit.
Congratulations Kianjin !! … and what about this : “Two new planets with a potential to be habitable may have been discovered at the of a Planet Hunters online citizen science project, Yale University reported.”
Details, details !! … or fake info ?
Hi,
Not to take away from Kijian’s keen eyes but this was already identified and noted in a paper well before June by the Kepler team. It was already a known eclipsing binary. They were already ahead of us with the data and follow-up observations. But this doesn’t take away that Planet Hunters is sensitive to these things and there are likely more of these systems that we might find with Planet Hunters.
I’d like to repeat what I had said on the Talk thread 4 months ago.
Nice catch indeed – Kudos to kianjin – very cool system – thanks for spotting this –
I found this in the Slawson et al 2011 paper on astro-ph (- (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2011arXiv1103.1659S)
“KID 12644769 (P = 41. 0781) has a single extra event in the light curve during Q1 with a depth of slightly less that ~ 2%. With only a single event, one cannot rule out a blend with a long period background EB and we do note that this feature is slightly deeper than the secondary eclipses. The event is potentially interesting considering the photometrically derived stellar parameters for this system in the KIC suggests that the components are late-K or M-dwarfs. (Teff = 4051K, log g = 4.48, radius= 0.74). If so, they imply that the radius of the transiting body is ~ 2RJup and that there may be a sub-stellar object orbiting this system.
These and other tertiary events are being studied and will be further described in an upcoming paper (Doyle et al. 2011).”
There may be more systems like this, definitely keep looking –
~Meg
Congratulations to Kianjin, not only for figuring out the planetary transit, but also for suggesting the name Tatooine.
very nice guys, it’s all very complicated maths and circumstantially swell.