Helping find new planet candidates
Today’s blog post come’s from guest blogger Mahamitra Jagadheshkumar, a summer student who worked on Planet Hunters and helped us sort through some of theQ2 light curves identified on Talk for additional planet candidates.
Hello fellow planet hunters my name is Mahamitra Jagadheshkumar, and I am a rising junior at The Bronx High School of Science in New York who has been doing research on exoplanets at Yale (I’ve been taking metro north to Yale 2 days a week) this summer. I have been working with Meg Schwamb on learning the techniques of planet hunting (mainly transiting) as well as programing in IDL. Over the summer my research included classifying over 500 transit candidates and eclipsing binaries in your talk discussions so the team can agree on a set of new planet candidates
PlanetHunters: the next steps
Hi Everyone! The first two planets have been published, so where do we go from here? We reviewed several hundred light curves that you flagged and boiled these down to the revised list posted on the planet candidates page. The Kepler team has reviewed the light curves of all stars on that list – several were identified as false positives, so we’ll be moving those stars off the planet candidates page. However, about ten objects passed the first stage of validation and now Jason Rowe, Steve Bryson and Natalie Batalha on the Kepler team are looking at them more carefully and I’ll be traveling to NASA Ames soon, to meet with them about this work.
You also discovered several eclipsing binary systems and we are working with planethuner kianjin on this. One of our Yale undergrad students (Farris Gillman) is traveling to meet with Prof Andrej Prsa (at Villanova University) next week and model these EB’s. We’ll post an update for you on progress from that work in the next week or two.
Another one of our undergrad students (Charlie Sharzer) is working on a senior thesis project, modeling the dynamics of moon captures by planets. He is hoping to figure out which of the Kepler planets are a priori most likely to harbor moons.
The Kepler space craft is continuing to collect more data on stars in the field, however the Kepler field is fading from view of Earth-bound telescopes as we orbit the Sun – the stars will be visible again in April 2012 when we’ll be ready to follow up on additional candidates that you find in the Q3 and Q4 data.
Bonjour from Nantes
Hi,
Just a quick note to say hello from the EPSC-DPS meeting in Nantes, France. Chris and I are attending the meeting this week in France. I’m presenting a poster on my Kuiper belt southern sky survey today. Tomorrow, I will be giving the Planet Hunters talk detailing our first results (thanks to all of your hard work and classifications). We’re quite excited to be sharing the results from Planet Hunters to the rest of the planetary science community.
Conferences are great because we get to share the new and latest results and get feedback from our fellow scientists in the community. We are slotted to be the last talk in the CoRoT and Kepler results session and we’ll be live tweeting the session. We’ll be giving a 7 minute talk (titled First Results from Planet Hunters: Exploring the Inventory of Short Period Planets from Kepler) with about 3 minutes for questions – so not very much time, but long enough to share the highlights from Planet Hunters including the two new planet candidates and the new results from my short period planet analysis.
As a teaser – here’s the title slide for the talk:
Cheers,
~Meg
PS. If you’re interested in following the news from the conference on twitter – you can follow Chris and I @chrislintott and @megschwamb and the twitter hashtag #DPSEPSC
Planet Hunters 