Planet Hunters’s First Circumbinary Planet- A True Team Effort
Today we have a guest post by Planet Hunters Robert Gagliano and Kian Jek, the discoverers of PH1, our first confirmed planet and first circumbinary planet.
Kian Jek found an anomalous dip in APH10421275 in May 2011 which turned out to be KIC 12644769 (Kepler-16b) the Kepler team’s first circumbinary planet discovery. He documented it on Talk in his thread “Strange transit in an EB”. He subsequently started a thread in the forums called “Finally-an EB with a planet?” Meg Schwamb then added a list of all known Kepler Eclipsing Binaries (EBs) with links to the light curves to this thread in November 2011.
Robert Gagliano did a systematic search of the ~ 1500 known Kepler EB’s, looking for possible planets in February 2012. He initially spotted a possible transit in Q4.1 at day 244 in SPH10052872 and subsequently a possible 2nd matching transit at day 106 in Q2.3. Interestingly, the day 106 transit had been detected previously by JKD and commented on by Kian in the thread “Potential TERNARY System“. Robert also noted a possible 3rd transit in Q5.3 at day 379 but didn’t comment on it because it was distorted and he wasn’t sure whether this was a real 3rd transit. This Q5.3 transit was subsequently predicted by an seo company and officially confirmed by Kian.
Kian decided to check the Skyview image to be sure it wasn’t contaminated from other background stars and did an analysis to determine if the transit period, depth, and duration were consistent with a planet. He detrended the light curve with a modified smoothing filter that removed the EB eclipses, leaving the suspected planetary transits in place, and then folded the curve to confirm that the profile of the transits were similar in depth and duration. His analysis was confirmatory. Meg then assembled an outstanding science team of 10 professionals to conduct extensive follow-up observations and data analysis. Eureka! KIC 4862625 was Planet Hunters’s “Tatooine”….we bagged our first circumbinary planet!
Q7, DPS, and more
Just a quick note to say that we’ve uploaded Q7 light curves. This is the first of the latest Kepler Quarters from the July 2012 data release. As with each new Quarter, there is a new chance to spot never before seen planets. In other news, I write this post in Denver, Colorado on my way to Reno, Nevada for the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences Meeting which starts on Monday. This is one of the largest yearly gatherings of planetary scientists each year. I’ll be giving a talk on Planet Hunters science results. Last year I gave a talk introducing the project and presenting our first two planet candidates that we had found and preliminary results from my short period planet analysis. I can’t wait to share our results with you. So keep a look out on this space, Facebook, and Twitter for updates about the meeting and my presentation. In the meantime why not classify a light curve or two?
~Meg
Finishing Q5
You might have noticed that we’re no longer showing Q5 light curves. That’s because we’ve retired Q5. Thanks to your efforts , almost all of the Q5 light curves have been reviewed by 5 or more volunteers. We’re putting in new data at the moment , but in the mean time we’ve gone back to showing Q3 light curves. Only about 30% of Q3 light curves were searched before we switched to a newer data release (Q4), so you’re seeing new light curves that haven’t been searched before. You might notice that Q3 has more glitches that Q5. You can find a guide here for some of the glitches you might spot in those light curves. We should have the new light curves ready soon, but there are still transits that may be hiding in the Q3 data, but we don’t know until we look.
Happy Hunting,
~Meg
Hunting for Planets at the Adler Planetarium
Today, we have a guest post from Laura Whyte. Laura completed a PhD in “The Quantitative Morphology of Barred Spiral Galaxies” at the University of Nottingham in 2004 – in other words she spent 4 years classifying galaxies! After a brief stint in adult education, Laura decided the place that she could make the biggest impact was the classroom, and so she retrained to teach in 2006. Three enjoyable years of teaching teenagers Maths, Physics, and Astronomy were followed by at stint at home with babies where, needing a hobby to keep her brain ticking over, Laura considered taking up knitting, but eventually decided instead to learn Ruby on Rails and start building websites. More recently Laura managed to get a job combining all her interests at Alder Planetarium, working with the Zooniverse to develop educational websites that complement the citizen science projects.
Planet Hunters Interactive Display at the Adler Planetarium – Image credit: David Miller
Many of you might not know that the majority of the ever growing Zooniverse technical and education team are based at the Adler Planetarium. Founded in 1930 by the Chicago business leader Max Adler, the planetarium is home to extensive space science exhibitions, and one of the world’s most important antique astronomical instrument collections on display. As a recognized leader in science education, with a focus on inspiring young people to pursue careers in science, the Adler is a natural home for the Zooniverse .
Building on the partnership between the Adler and the Zooniverse , a number of citizen science projects have made their way onto the museum floor. The most recent of which is the Planet Hunters interface which has been imbedded into the recently opened exhibit, “The Universe: A Walk through Space and Time”. This interactive exhibition invites visitors to explore the big questions: How large is the Universe? Where did it come from? Are we alone?
Image credit: David Miller
The Planet Hunters interface is extremely popular with visitors, with over 10,000 light curves classified since the gallery’s opening in early July. More exciting though, there is a unique opportunity for visitors to continue their exploration of space once they leave the planetarium. As well as a t-shirt from the gift shop, visitors can take home knowledge of Planet Hunters and maybe discover an exoplanet. How’s that for an exciting day out?
The Summer Triangle and Telescope Proposals
The Kepler field is located in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra. You can find the Kepler field by looking for the Summer Triangle, the corners which are composed of the brightest stars in the constellations Aquila, Cygnus, and Lyra: Altair, Deneb, and Vega. Along the Deneb and Vega side, you’ll find the stars that make up the Kepler targets. As its name implies, the Summer Triangle and the Kepler field are high in the Northern skies during the Summer months.
As August ends and we enter September, the Kepler field is slowly getting lower in the sky each night. By the end of the month it will be difficult to observe from telescopes in the Northern Hemisphere like the Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea in Hawaii and the WIYN telescope on Kitt Peak in Arizona. Astronomers studying the stars and confirming the planet candidates in the Kepler field will have to wait until next year to observe starting about May when the Kepler field will rise again above the horizon for a large fraction of the night.
Even though we won’t be able to observe the Kepler field for several months, if we want to use the Keck telescopes to study Planet Hunters candidates next year we have to decide now what we’re going to do, what telescopes we need, and how many nights because of how observing time on these telescopes is decided.
Observing time on telescope is limited and highly coveted. Astronomers compete to get time of these telescopes to observe, and there are more good observing projects than are nights to give on telescopes like Keck, Gemini, and the VLT (Very Large Telescope). For Keck and those telescopes on Kitt Peak, the time on these precious resources is divided between the institutions that built and maintain these telescopes. In addition a small portion of nights goes to NASA and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, and the observing time from these two institutions is up for grabs and open to all astronomers at US institutions.
So how does proposing and getting observing time exactly work? Usually twice a year, there is a call for proposals, asking astronomers to propose for time that they want and justify what they need it for. Then the TAC (Time Allocation Committee) meets, ranking each proposal. The top ranked proposals will get the time they ask for on the telescopes. Many times there will be good proposals that won’t get any time because the telescopes are oversubscribed, more people apply than time is available. At most you’ll be able to get a few nights on these telescopes if you are lucky.
The nights on the telescopes from February 2013 through July 2013 are allocated this Fall. A place like Yale, we have access to the WIYN 3.5-m telescope at Kitt Peak, the SMARTS telescopes in Chile. We also have ~10 nights a semester on the Keck telescopes in Hawaii allotted to Yale observers. So this week and next week, I’ll be writing a telescope proposal where I need to justify what I want to do and why it is important. I’ll need to determine what instrument I need and how it needs to be set up. I’ll have decide how many nights are required to get the observations and come up with a list of targets to observe. If all goes well and with a bit of luck I get the time, when the Summer Triangle is high in the sky again next year, I’ll fly to the Big Island of Hawaii and take those observations I’m planning now.
Mind the Gap
As I write this, I’m sitting on a train from London in the middle of the English countryside bound for Oxford. I’ll be spending the next week at the Zooniverse’s Oxford headquarters visiting Chris. I’ll be working and thinking about all things exoplanets and Planet Hunters.
Close to this time last year I visited Oxford for a weeklong visit after the AAS Division of Planetary Sciences (DPS) Meeting in Nantes, France. Chris and I were working on finalizing and interpretting the first go through of the weighting scheme and Round 2 review and planning in the short term where Planet Hunters was heading. During that week, sitting in the Royal Oak (the pub where it all started in some sense – it’s the place where the idea for Galaxy Zoo was born), Chris and I, over a pint, outlined and planned what would become my short period planets paper. The project has made alot of progress since then, and we couldn’t do it without the contributions from all of you who make it possible with your classifications on the main site and efforts on Talk. Planet Hunters has 3 scientific papers now published or soon to be pubished in astronomical journals (Chris’s Quarter 2 planet candidates paper was recently accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal last week).
There’s lot to do this week and plan for especially with Kepler’s extended mission and the start of Kepler data being released every 3 months once the Quarter is complete come November. (More on that to come in November/December as we get closer to the extended mission.) This week, I’ll be showing Chris some of the research I’ve been doing over the summer, and we’ll plan the next few papers we aim to write. I’ve been working on improving the scheme I developed for Quarter 1 to identify transits by combining your classifications, and I’ve started applying it to Quarters 3,4, and 5. This summer also included some follow-up work on a few of our planet candidates we’ve identified in the past 6 months, though the results aren’t quite finished yet. My collaborators and I are still working hard on that, and I’ll share the results once they’re ready and we’re confident in them. I’ll be presenting the results from this work and what Chris and I get accomplished this week in Reno, Nevada at this year’s DPS meeting in October. My abstract was accepted and I’m scheduled to give a talk on the first day of the conference.
Zoonibot
Today’s guest blog is from Adrian Price-Whelan. Adrian is a graduate student at Columbia University’s Department of Astronomy. As a former research scientist with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), Adrian became interested in large survey science and statistical inference in large data sets. He is currently working on projects in time-domain astrophysics using data from the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF), but is interested in a constantly-growing list of astrophysical topics that incorporate theory, observation, and instrumentation. Outside of research, Adrian enjoys playing and writing music, programming, teaching, and bicycling around Manhattan.
Imagine yourself as a new user on Planet Hunters. You’re just starting to get familiar with the data when you come across a light curve with some features you don’t recognize. It doesn’t look like a transit, but it definitely isn’t noise — what is it? Enter Zoonibot!
Zoonibot was conceived as a sort-of “Planet Hunters butler,” for Talk able and ready to automatically answer questions and provide detail when users request information. It all started at the .Astronomy 4 conference in Heidelberg after just a few hours of planning, and after spending the rest of the day (and night!) writing code, Zoonibot could perform 2 functions! 1) He is able to respond to users who request help by commenting with a #help hashtag and 2) he can cross-reference sources flagged as “transit” or “planet” to see if they are actually known eclipsing binaries.
But our ideas didn’t stop there! One idea for some more advanced behavior is to build in some data analysis tools. Consider an example — given the case above, let’s say you comment on your mystery object with a question: “What is this object #zoonibot? #help!”. The hash tags tell Zoonibot that someone needs him! In this example, Zoonibot could do some simple data analysis with the light curve data and try to classify the type of variability, producing an automated response to the user with his interpretation of the data.
We will certainly provide another update when there is more to tell about the life of Zoonibot!
– Adrian Price-Whelan, Chris Beaumont,Gabe Perez-Giz, Chris Lintott, David Hogg, Meg Schwamb.
History of Zoonibot July 10 2012
Drawing of Zoonibot provided courtesy of our PH Talk Moderator echo-lily-mai’s daughter
Sagan Exoplanet Summer Workshop
Greetings from sunny warm southern California. I’ve been spending the week at Caltech in Pasadena, CA for the Sagan Exoplanet Summer Workshop. It’s been a full week of talks, tutorials, and hands-on session on the latest on transit light curves both in science results and analysis. There are about ~140 people mainly postdocs and graduate students who are working on or are interested in getting into studying exoplanets. The talks are geared for new people in the field with researchers in a variety of related subject areas talking about open questions and surveying where the topic currently is.
All the talk slides are online if you’re interested in seeing what’s been discussed. Also, the talks are being recorded and eventually will be posted online. There were also electronic posters (I submitted one for Planet Hunters) which you can peruse here and here. Also many of the participants gave POP talks which were short 2 minute talks which I think gave a great sense of the wide variety of people in attendance. I gave one trying to highlight everything we’ve done so far in the project is 2 minutes (it was tough to boil all of it down to 2 minutes).
It’s been nice to be back at Caltech where I went to grad school, but I’ve really enjoyed learning about different tools and techniques written to fit transits, estimate masses of planets from transit timing variations in the light curve, and process and analyze Kepler light curves (PyKE). Today is the last day of talks. I’m a bit sad to leave to the warm California sun, but I’m keen to bring the tips and tricks I’ve learned this week back to New Haven and apply them to the analysis of the Planet Hunters data.
~Meg
Electronic Poster
I wanted to share you the poster I’ve just submitted for the Sagan Exoplanet Summer Workshop. It’s a yearly workshop hosted by the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute located at Caltech, and the workshop will be held just a few buildings down the street from where I had my office in graduate school. The workshop is in a few weeks at the end of July. It’s a little different than a conference because it’s not necessarily to present your latest results, but bring together people to teach analysis techniques and gather exoplanet experts with graduate students, postdocs, and researchers who are involved in exoplanets as well as those interested in getting involved in exoplanet research.
The theme of this year’s workshop is “Working with Exoplanet Light Curves”. There will be talks and sessions about different topics related to analyzing light curves (including from Kepler) and there will also have hands-on sessions to teach new analysis techniques and software packages developed to study transits. I’m hoping to pick up a few new tricks to help with analysis and confirmation of Planet Hunters planet candidates and in general learn more about the methods other scientists are using to analyze light curves.
I’m also presenting an electronic poster (which will be shown in a rotation of other posters throughout the duration of the conference on computer monitors ) as well as a short 2 slide talk on what Planet Hunters has been up to over the past year. The deadline for the electronic poster was today. So I thought I’d share it with all of you. It’s meant to be an introduction to the project and highlight some of our past results. Our latest results aren’t quite ready for prime time, we’ll be able to share those results once we have them in the Fall. We’re still getting observations from Keck and other telescopes for our latest candidates and will be spending the rest of the summer working on analyzing those observations.
Cheers,
~Meg
Proof is in the Pudding
Hi,
I wanted to give a brief update on the short period planets paper that just recently got accepted to Astrophysical Journal. Once you’ve gone through the referee process and the paper gets accepted. You go through the editorial stage of the paper where the journal formats your paper into the nice two column format of the journal and puts your figures into the text so that everything looks seamless and coherent. On top of that, a copy editor reads your paper searching and correcting for typos, grammatical errors, and formatting errors. Once this has been done, you receive the proofs of your paper, what it will look like in the final print version in the general. One version, the ‘redline’ copy, highlights the corrections and changes from the copy editor and the other shows how the paper will look in journal format including where all the figures will be positioned. So I just got the proofs for my paper a few days, and I’ve gone through and checked the copy editor’s modifications. For the ones I disagree with, I can submit a response explaining my reasoning and those edits may be modified. Now that the proofs are in and reviewed, the next step is publication (expected to be formally in August). The paper is online in pre-print format so everyone can read the results early, but the publishing in the journal is considered the official stamp of approval that the publication is scientifically valid and that the results have been peer-reviewed.
So what’s next? We’ll right now I’m working on some observing follow-up of our highest priority planet candidates. We’ve been getting follow-up observations to help study and confirm if these are real planet transits. I was helping to observe on the Keck telescopes Monday and Tuesday nights (Hawaiian time). I didn’t get to be go out Hawaii or Mauna Kea. I was observing remotely from the comforts of home (well, the Yale Keck remote observing run across from my office in New Haven). So Tuesday and Wednesday morning on the East coast I was helping to drive the Keck I around and take high resolution spectra including observations of a Planet Hunters candidate or two. Additionally, we’re looking for new planet candidates and we could use your help. I’ve run an adapted version of my transit selection pipeline from Q1 data and I’ve applied it to all the classifications from Q2-Q5 that we have complete. We have a large list of potential unknown planet candidates. We need help sorting through identifying those light curves from our top list have actual planet transits similar to what we did for the short period planet analysis. If you’d like to help with the sorting, we could use all the help we can get. Go to http://www.review.planethunters.org now.
Clear Skies,
~Meg
Planet Hunters 