Making Way for Q16
Currently the light curves you are classifying on Planet Hunters come from Quarter 14 (Q14) of Kepler data. With the start of the new year, we’re close to having the classifications needed to move on to newer Kepler observations. We have a new quarter (90 days) of Kepler data processed and loaded into the website, poised and ready to start showing on the main classification interface once Q14 is complete.
We’ve decided to skip Quarter 15 for the moment and instead go on to Quarter 16 (Q16), the most recent hot off the presses data released by NASA and the Kepler team. Similar to Q14, the naming convention for Q16 starts with APHF to distinguish it from the other quarters of data already shown on Planet Hunters. You might have already noticed that the Q16 light curves are in Talk and the source pages.
Quarter 16 is the last full quarter of observations to come off of the Kepler spacecraft of the star field that Kepler had monitored for the past four years. Shortly after the start of Quarter 17, Kepler had a reaction wheel failure that has crippled the spacecraft such that it can no longer point with sufficient accuracy to look for planets as it had once done in the Kepler field. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the first full engineering test field observations of a two-wheeled Kepler mission (dubbed ‘K2’), to search for exoplanets around stars in the ecliptic plane, will begin in early March.
With any luck the NASA senior review this Spring will approve the K2 mission, and if all goes ahead there will be Kepler light curves of new stars coming for at least 2 more years , barring any unexpected spacecraft malfunctions. In the meantime we have the K2 engineering data to look forward to and the remaining primary mission Kepler data (Q1-Q17) to search through.
You can help make way for Quarter 16 by classifying light curves today at http://www.planethunters.org
AAS Talk – Planet Hunters: Kepler by Eye
Yesterday I gave a talk at the 223rd American Astronomical Society meeting titled ‘Planet Hunters: Kepler by Eye’ at the National Harbor outside of Washington, DC. The talk gives a brief overview of 3 years of Planet Hunters science. I decided rather than just posting the slides, I’d record one of my practice run throughs of my talk. Below is the recorded video. This was before I gave my talk, so there may been some minor tweaks and changes but the main points and slides are the same.
Planet Hunters at the 223rd American Astronomical Society Meeting
Today is the first day of the American Astronomical Society’s (AAS) 223rd meeting. This 4 day conference is being held at the National Harbor outside of Washington, DC. It is one of the largest yearly gatherings of astronomers and astrophysicists from across the US and around the world. Most of the Planet Hunters science team will be in attendance this year. You can follow along with the attendees (including me) who will be live tweeting the conference with the hashtag #AAS223.
Most attendees at AAS will present talks and posters about their current research. Typical talks are about 5 minutes in length with a minute or two for questions. There are also longer plenary talks from invited speakers and the winners from the previous year’s AAS-sponsored awards and prizes. I’ve been invited to give a longer talk in one of the two special sessions being organized at the meeting on Kepler science. I will be one of the first talks of the meeting, giving the first talk in the ‘Exoplanets and Kepler Astrophysics Special Session’ today. I will have 30 minutes (including the time for audience questions) to give an overview of Planet Hunters and the science highlights from the past 3 years. My talk is titled ‘Planet Hunters: Kepler by Eye’. You can read the abstract here. I’m very excited about this opportunity to promote Planet Hunters and show the rest of the field the science we’ve been doing with your help. I’ll try to post my slides on the blog later in the week.
Also Joey Schmitt from Yale will be presenting a poster titled ‘Two New Confirmed Planets and the First Kepler Seven Candidate System’ this week at AAS as well. You can read his poster abstract here.
Updated Talk Labels
We have made some updates to the labels that you may encounter on Talk. You may might noticed that sometimes below the light curve on its Talk page, there was black text below such as ‘Kepler favorite’ or ‘known eclipsing binary’ for example. In these cases, the light curves where from stars where the Kepler team had already identified what they believed to be an exoplanet transiting or an eclipsing star respectively. In preparation for Quarter 16, we have updated and expanded the list of Talk labels.
Updated Talk Labels
The Kepler team’s planet candidate list from Quarter’s 1-12 is now out, and you’ll find those stars listed as Kepler favorites. Stars that are believed to harbor multiple transiting planets have an additional label, ‘Kepler multiplanet candidate’. The Kepler team has also expanded their list of false positives, where there is a signal the Kepler team spotted in the observations of that star that looks like a transit, but is due to some other astrophysical cause or systematic error. You’ll find those stars labeled as ‘Confirmed Kepler false-positive’. The Kepler eclipsing binary catalog has been updated as well, and a preliminary version of the new catalog was used to identify already known eclipsing binaries.
New Talk Labels
To help with the volunteer-led efforts on Talk to find new planet candidates, we now identify with labels those light curves that are from stars that the Kepler team’s automated detection algorithm identified potential transit signals or Threshold Crossing Events (TCEs) as they are dubbed by the Kepler team. TCEs are not planet candidates, much more vetting and analysis goes into reviewing the TCEs in order to identify the planet candidates among them. You will see the TCEs from the Q1-Q12 observation identified by the Kepler team’s automated routines on Talk with the label ‘Kepler Threshold Crossing Event Candidate’.
Planet Hunters volunteers have been spotting new dwarf novae and RR Lyrae variable stars on Talk. To help with this effort, we have now included labels for both categories. You’ll see ‘Known Dwarf Nova’ and ‘Known RR Lyrae Variable Star’ respectively. Thanks to Daryll (nighthawk_black) for assembling the Dwarf novae list and to Abe (cappella) and Robert Szabo for the RR Lyrae list.
Let’s not forget PH1 b and circumbinary planets, where the planet orbits both stars in a stellar binary. The 6 published circumbinary planets are now labeled in Talk as ‘Confirmed Circumbinary Planet’. So let’s go find another!
Happy hunting!
Planet Hunters 