Planet Hunters PH1 Live Chat
This week we announced the discovery of our first confirmed planet, PH1.
On Monday, we’ll be having a live chat with the discoverers as well as some of the astronomers who have helped along the way to take us from planet candidate to confirmed planet.
We’ll be talking to Josh Carter (Harvard Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics), Robert Gagliano (Planet Hunters), Kian Jek (Planet Hunters), Chris Lintott (University of Oxford/Zooniverse/Planet Hunters), Jerry Orosz (San Diego State University) and Meg Schwamb (Yale University/Planet Hunters). We’ll be giving you the inside story on how we characterized and confirmed the PH1 system, as well as answering some of your questions,.
Join us here on Monday October 22nd at 11:30am PDT (2:30pm EDT or 7:30pm BST or 18:30 UTC)
5 responses to “Planet Hunters PH1 Live Chat”
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- - October 24, 2012
Planet Hunters 
Hi there
I would like to know the names of the ‘citizen scientist’ on Planet Hunters who actually made these observation, including the scientists who later confirmed this finding, will you kindly be announcing their names as well ?
You can find all that information in our blog post announcing the discovery here
~Meg
Congratulations on your recent “find”. It has drawn me to you – so I’m a newbie at the thing, but arrive with much interest and more than a little background reading. I’m thinking that the chances of actually seeing a planetary transit in another system is quite small for any given system with planets. Seems to me that stereoscopically-speaking there are just a few sets of orbits (or ecliptics) which would actually cross the “sun” and still face in our direction. Am I correct? Regards, R.
Short answer – yes. For a given system, we’d have to be lucky to see transits. How lucky depends on the size of the star and the orbital radius of the planet. (for example, about 1.7% of distant observers would see transits of Earth). Kepler deals with this by watching an enormous number of stars. As far as we can tell, planetary orbits are randomly oriented in the Galaxy, so watching enough stars gives the statistics (since we know how strong the angular selection is for each kind of star and orbit).