Latest Science Paper Accepted for Publication: The First Kepler Seven Planet Candidate System and 13 Other Planet Candidates from the Kepler Archival Data

Today we have a  post from Joey Schmitt, a graduate student in the Astronomy department at Yale University, where he is  working with the exoplanet group led by Debra Fischer, and in particular he has been working on the follow-up of Planet Hunters planet candidates.

We at Planet Hunters are happy to announce the acceptance of the PHVI paper to the Astronomical Journal, in which 14 new planet candidates were discovered. All of these new planet candidates are located far from their host stars. In fact, seven of them lie in their host star’s habitable zone. Unfortunately, all of these planets are too large to be Earth-like.

Two of the new planet candidates are in multiple candidate systems. One of them, the new candidate orbiting KOI-351, is the seventh planet candidate orbiting its host star. Planet Hunters actually detected three new candidates around this star when KOI-351 was only known to have three candidates, showing how great the Planet Hunters can be in discovering multiple planet systems. The planets in KOI-351 also show strong gravitational interactions between the planets, which helps to confirm them as true planets. The gravity from some planets in the system causes other planets to transit before or after what we would otherwise expect, called transit timing variations. In fact, the second-to-last planet transited a full day after we expected it would. Others in the exoplanet field have been working for over a year to determine the masses of these planets.

The new candidate in KOI-351 makes it the only star with seven known transiting planets. After our submission in October, two other teams claimed confirmation of the seven signals to various levels of certainty. Look forward to the brand new stars in the K2 campaign, changes to the Planet Hunters strategy, and new papers of the latest planets and candidates discovered by Planet Hunters.

You can read the revised accepted version of the paper here. The Planet Hunters volunteers who participated in identifying and analyzing the candidates presented in this paper are acknowledged  at http://www.planethunters.org/PH6, and the contributions of the entire Planet Hunters community are individually acknowledged at http://www.planethunters.org/authors.