Downloading the Data
We’ve rolled out a new feature to the site. You now have the ability to download the lightcurve data directly from Planet Hunters. Once you’ve classified a star and submitted the transits, the download data button will appear and is available for every star on its source page (ie http://www.planethunters.org/sources/SPH10067557) as well as from the user My Star page (http://www.planethunters.org/profile) where you can download the data for all the stars you’ve classified (we’ve now paginated the My Stars page so all your favorites and all the stars you’ve classified should now be listed).
The file is in CSV (Comma-Separated Values) format which can be opened directly or imported into Excel, Numbers or the Open Office equivalent where you can then plot and manipulate the data. We provide additional info about the star properties including infrared color, specific gravity, right ascension and declination, and Kepler IDs. We also identify if the star is a Simulation (simulated transit lightcurve), a Kepler Planet Candidate (ie Kepler Favorite -a star that the Kepler team believes has a transiting planet but has not confirmed with follow-up observations) or Source (real Kepler lightcurve). For the simulated lightcurves, the CSV file will provide the planet radius in Earth radii and orbital period in days for the injected transit signal (assuming the given radius of the star).
The CSV file also contains three columns of data labeled time (days), brightness, error in brightness. The brightness values are the brightness of the star measured by Kepler per observation corrected for instrumental effects and systematic errors by the Kepler Team’s data processing pipeline. The error in brightness is simply +/- error in the reported brightness measurement. We’ve normalized the brightness values by dividing what we get from the Kepler public release data by a constant value just for convenience, so it’s easier to measure relative change in the brightness of the star. This just shifts the absolute value of the y-axis up or down for our plotted lightcurves but doesn’t change the actual depths of any transits. For more specifics about the data, see the Corrected Light Curves section of http://keplergo.arc.nasa.gov/DataAnalysisProducts.shtml.
Some times there’s a missing data point in the lightcurves the Kepler Team has released. These missing data points indicate a”no data” condition where the observation has been compromised by spacecraft operations or other anomalies that effect the quality of the measurements (examples might be the spacecraft entering safe mode or possibly a glitch with the electronics that readout for the flux measurements for that star). To indicate those data points we’ve set the brightness value to zero in the CSV file.
Happy Hunting,
Simulated Transits
In this blog post, we wanted to focus on the simulated transits you’ve been seeing and why they’re important to the project, as well as answer some of the questions regarding them.
One of the goal of Planet Hunters is to explore the diversity of the terrestrial and giant planet populations and begin to understand the spectrum of solar systems providing crucial context for own solar system. How many Jupiter sized planets are out there? How many Neptune-sized? How many Earth-sized? are solar systems like ours common? These questions are fundamental to understanding how planets form and evolve.
With just the planet discoveries alone you can’t answer these questions because you don’t know how complete the sample is. This is because you don’t know how sensitive to detecting planets of different types the project is, particularly since this is a new way to look for planets that has never been done before. If we found one earth-sized planet for example. We can’t say anything about their abundance compared to gas giant planets, since we don’t know how many we might have missed in the data set -that’s where the simulated transits come in.
We added Kepler lightcurves into the PH interface with simulated transits, spanning the range of exoplanet radii and orbital periods, to test which kinds of transiting planets can be detected with Planet Hunters to assess the fraction of missed planets. If users flag 100% of the Jupiter-sized planets with orbital periods shorter than 30 days, but only 50% of the Neptune-size planets with orbital periods shorter than 30 days, then we know that the number of transiting Neptunes in the real light curves is a factor of two larger than what has been flagged. This provides a powerful statement about the fraction of transiting planets that could only be made with the Planet Hunter collective.
It might seem like we’re testing you or trying to train you to identify transits , but we’re really testing the project. This is a really vital part of the project, with these simulated transits we can answer these really interesting and fundamental questions about how solar systems and planets form.
Some of the simulated planets like large Jupiter-sized planets will be really easy to spot while others will be near impossible to identify especially for the extremely small planets, but don’t be discouraged if you didn’t find the simulated transit. That’s okay, that’s part of the experiment. We don’t know what Planet Hunters we will be able to detect so we have to look at the look at range of possible planet radii and orbits. Can we find 1.2 Earth radii planets? 1.6? and how does incompleteness change in this critical range of radius? How much worse does detectability get when there is just 1 transit instead of 3?- with the simulated transits we will be able to answer these questions. With this information we can then start putting a picture together of the abundance and variety of solar systems.
We will always identify the simulated transit points in red after you’ve classified the star and will mark the lightcurve as simulated data in Talk. The reason we don’t identify the simulated data first, is that if you knew the lightcurve had simulated events you might look at it differently. To be able to use the data from the simulated transits accurately, we need them to be examined in exactly the same conditions as the real lightcurves.
Users on PH Talk have said that for some of the simulated transits the red points are in the wrong spot. The points we are marking for the simulated transits are correct. There are two reasons why it might look like the points are wrong
- The lightcurve have really a small and distat planet injected, and the flux drop caused by this planet would be so small it doesn’t look any different than the normal lightcurve. Right now we’re working to display the radius and period of the simulated transit signal injected, once you’ve classified it, so you can identify this for yourself.
- The star is an eclipsing binary or already has a transit signal from a larger planet than the one we injected into the lightcurve, since we don’t know beforehand which of the lightcurves in the Kepler data set have transiting planets or stars. These simulated events and your classifications for them are still useful because it gives us estimates for multiplanet system and how sensitive we could detect an additional transiting planet.
We know there were a few glitches we needed to work out with the simulated lightcurves that were making them conspicuous, we’ve fixed those, and the zoom works for the simulated lightcurves. We’ve also dialed back how frequently a user will see a simulated lightcurve. We’ll post some examples of the simulated transits in the next blog post.
Happy Hunting,
Stellar Variability
Greetings from Kevin Schawinski and Meg Schwamb, postdoctoral fellows at Yale and members of the Science Team.
Wow, we’ve been blown away by how enthusiastic everyone has been about the project. In this post, we wanted to talk more about another goal of Planet Hunters, which is to study and better understand stellar variability. The public release Kepler data set is unprecedented, both in observing cadence and in the photometric precision. The lightcurves reveal subtle variability that has never before been documented.
The Kepler lightcurves are complex many exhibiting significant structure including multiple oscillations imposed on top of each other as well as short-lived variations. Most of this variability is due by starspots or stellar pulsations.With Planet Hunters we will not only be looking for stars harboring planets outside of our solar system, but we will be able to study and classify stellar variability in ways that automated routines cannot. Unlike a machine learning approach, human classifiers recognize the unusual and have a remarkable ability to recognize archetypes and assemble groups of similar objects.
Users have the ability to identify strange or unusual lightcurves as well as tag similar curves and come up with their own classes or ”collections” of variability with Planet Hunters Talk. You can add a comment and use the #hashtag like in Twitter to mark an interesting lightcurve and alert others including the science team. Every light curve, or collection of curves has a short-message thread (140 characters) associated with it for general comments. You also can start discussions if you want to chat in a more in-depth fashion.
Mining the Kepler data set will inevitably lead to unexpected discoveries, showcased by the successes of Galaxy Zoo. The prime examples are the discoveries of ”Hanny’s Voorwerp” and the ”green peas” by Galaxy Zoo users. Hanny’s Voorwerp is a cloud of ionized gas in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey image of the nearby galaxy IC 2497. Unlike an automatic classification routine, citizen scientist Hanny van Arkel spotted a blue smudge next to IC 2497, recognized it as unusual, and alerted the Galaxy Zoo team and the other users. Since then, Hanny’s Voorwerp has been identified as a light echo from a recent quasar phase in IC 2497, making it the Rosetta Stone of quasars. The Galaxy Zoo participants started noticing a very rare class of objects of point sources showed as green in the SDSS color scheme. Dubbing them the ”green peas,” the citizen scientists scoured the SDSS database, and assembled a list of these ”pea galaxies.” The ”peas” were revealed to be ultra-compact, powerful starburst galaxies whose properties are highly unusual in the present day universe, but resemble those of primordial galaxies in the early universe. The citizen scientists found veritable fossils living in the present-day universe.
With so many eyes looking at the lightcurves, we are bound to find new variability types! We’re hoping that Planet Hunters, like Galaxy Zoo, will yield exciting new results that we can’t even attempt to speculate or imagine! We can’t wait to see what turns up.
Planet Hunters Introduction
Hi, I’m Meg Schwamb a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University and member of the Planet Hunters Team. Welcome to Planet Hunters! We’ve been working hard, and we are excited to finally show you the finished product!
In the last decade, we have seen an explosion in the number of known planets orbiting stars beyond our own solar system. With ground based transit searches, stellar radial-velocity observations, and microlensing detections, over 500 extrasolar planets (exoplanets) have been discovered to date. Studying the physical and dynamical properties of each of these new worlds has revolutionized our understanding of planetary formation and the evolution of planetary systems. But we have just barely scratched the surface in understanding the diversity of planetary systems and planet formation pathways.The current inventory of known exoplanets has been limited to mostly Jupiter-sized or larger gas-rich planets, most orbiting extremely close to their parent stars. The current inventory of known exoplanets has been limited to mostly Jupiter-sized or larger gas-rich planets, most orbiting extremely close to their parent stars. While these planets have provided great insight into the formation of giant planets, beyond Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, in our own solar system, little is known about the formation and prevalence of rocky terrestrial planets in the universe.
Finding Earth-size planets is a difficult task because the transit-signals, the dimming of the star’s light caused be a planet moving in front of the star, are so shallow. For a Jupiter-size planet, the transit depth is ~1% of the star’s brightness. For an Earth-size planet transiting a Sun-like star the decrease in brightness is less than .001%. Ground-based surveys have not reached the sensitivity to detect such planets around stars similar to our Sun, but with NASA’s space-based Kepler mission, launched in March 2009, astronomers are primed to start a new era in the study of exoplanets. Even with the exceptional data from the Kepler telescope, finding these Earth-sized planets will be extremely difficult, but in the age of Kepler, the first rocky planets will likely be detected including the potential to find Earth-like planets residing in the habitable zone, warm enough to harbor liquid water and potentially life on their surfaces.
NASA’s Kepler spacecraft is one of the most powerful tools in the hunt for extrasolar planets. The Kepler data set is unprecedented, both in observing cadence and in the photometric precision. Before Kepler, the only star monitored this precisely was our own Sun. The lightcurves reveal subtle variability that has never before been documented. The Kepler data set is a unique reservoir waiting to be tapped. Kepler lightcurves are now publicly available with the first data release this past June and the next release scheduled for February 2011.
The Kepler Team computers are sifting through the data, but we at Planet Hunters are betting that there will be transit signals which can only be found via the remarkable human ability for pattern recognition. Computers are only good at finding what they’ve been taught to look for. Whereas the human brain has the uncanny ability to recognize patterns and immediately pick out what is strange or unique, far beyond what we can teach machines to do. With Planet Hunters we are looking for the needle in the haystack, and ask you to help us search for planets.
This is a gamble, a bet, if you will, on the ability of humans to beat machines just occasionally. It may be that no new planets are found or that computers have the job down to a fine art. That’s ok. For science to progress sometimes we have to do experiments, and although it may not seem like it at the time negative results are as valuable as positive ones. Most of the lightcurves will be flat devoid of transit signals but yet, it’s just possible that you might be the first to know that a star somewhere out there in the Milky Way has a companion, just as our Sun does.
Fancy giving it a try?
Planet Hunters 