When I posted with news of our second paper’s submission last week I mentioned that the new paper from the Kepler team included a section on Planet Hunters.

The section (7.4, since you’re asking) is fabulous, mentioning the ‘remarkable enthusiasm’ of Planet Hunters volunteers, who are not only have the ‘opportunity to experience the scientific method but also the possibility of experiencing the gratification of discovery’.

There should be a whole lot of gratification around, because as well as our own candidates the paper included details of several co-discoveries, where nine of Kepler’s planet candidates were independently identified by our volunteers. The following Planet Hunters thus can claim to have officially discovered planet candidates. In each case, the names in bold were the first to identify a transit in a particular light curve – congratulations to all involved.

KIC 5864975

pina1234, Mary Corfield, Frank Barnet, Derrick Martinez, Vince Brytus, Darin Ragozzine (!), Gary Butler, Robert Casey, Krishna Babu, ‘shutterbug’, Hein Min Tun, Juan Albornoz, Gerald R. Green, Robert Spiker, Natalie Van Cleef

KIC 11875734

Robert Gagliano (who was on the list for the recently announced candidates too), Malcolm Lambert, Di Miceli Gaetano, Hitesh Patel, Robert Rozanski, Penn Gwenn, Jari Paakkonen, ‘maya’, John Mackereth, ‘zocker’, Dominick Dennis, Carl-Johan Wikman, ‘chulej’, Oleg Tsybulskyi

KIC 8160953

Frank Barnet, John Robinson, ‘colinjdavis’, Jari Paakkonen, Carl Davidson, Bruno Mauguin, Jan Bernard, Lee Chapman, Hans Martin Schwengeler, ‘Aurelhun’, Pablo Barroso Rodriguez, Julie Donnell, Dani Iannarelli, Peter Kool, Simon Humphreys, Chris Price, Alan Bowler, Jeff Mack, Rafal Konkol

KIC 6504954

Patrick Gruber, Malcolm Wain, Andrew Young, Steve Harris, ‘planet10’, Juha Lindqvist, Navid Baraty, ‘ahora’, Julia Fedyakina, John Harper, Pablo Barroso Rodriguez, Sue Wilson, Mathew Hadfield, John Ord, Bob Chau, Calum Patterson, Matthew Connolly

KIC 7761918

Breeann Phillips, Abe Hoekstra, ‘ozanne’, Daniel Speir, ‘komandantmirko’, Daryll LaCourse, Daniel Getler, Gene Cumberland, Dave Skillman, Tony Hoffman, Joe Johnson, ‘Tem’, Steve Stav, Daniel Meyersohn, Frederico Centeno Selbach, Mark Riggs

KIC 3326377

‘ronalde000’, Bob Leask, ‘oneironautics’, Bartömiej Jaracz, Priscilla Nowajewski, ‘lolodec’, Michael Ware, Larry Melanson, Victor Gabriel Bibeo, ‘AtheistRamblings’, Stuart Lynn (!), Abe Hoekstra, Andrew Rose, ‘dalwhinnie’, Loic Petitpas

KIC 6268648

‘snark’, Fiona Wynn, Ilya Karpeev, Lily Lau, ‘nargatte’, Kristian U. Saetre, Lubomir Stiak, D Le Clercq, Jeremy Garrett, Lee Martin, Verena Resch, Robert Fletcher, Jason Muir, Nick Amsel, Michael Kavanagh, Anthony Goddard, Tom Hartfil-Allgood, Shannon McLaughlin, ‘Natframpton’, Peter Unitt, Steve House, Paul Wightman, Pooja Rathod, Simon Stockwell, Jenny Satelle, Owain Dewi Hughes, Richard Hopkins, Adam Bunce, Simon Gardiner, ‘snorrelo’, Thomas McGauran, ‘tom0366’, ‘Chippywheetoes’, Ben Galley, Kirsty McMonagle, Rich Haines, Adam Derdzikowski, ‘pat’, Mark Halstead

Way back in January I blogged about our announcement of two new candidates, confidently predicting that the paper would be out in the next few days. That didn’t happen for all sorts of reasons, but it’s now submitted to the Astronomical Journal. Rather than wait until we get the referee’s seal of approval (or a lot of criticism!), we’ve made the paper public via the arXiv – you can read it here.

As the picture on the blog post shows, five volunteers are co-authors, many more are thanked in the paper, and there’s a link to the authors page to give credit to all our volunteers for taking part. In the month or so that we’ve had since the conference, we’ve done some more work to pin down the behaviour of these systems. The first exciting new discovery was the length of time between transits was changing slightly for KIC4552729. These transit timing variations, or TTVs, suggest that there’s something else there, another body whose gravity is affecting the orbit of the planet candidate whose transits we do detect. We need more data to work out exactly what’s going on, but the immediate implication is that it’s more likely that our planet candidate is real, as it’s harder to create a three-body system using interference from background eclipsing binaries.

We also – mostly for fun – worked out whether the two planets that Planet Hunters had uncovered could be in the habitable zone of their star, that thin sliver of space where liquid water, and hence life, might be able to survive on the surface of a planet. Now, both of ours are almost certainly too large to be anything but gaseous, and one has to make a planet’s worth of assumptions about things like its albedo (how much light is reflected and how much absorbed by the atmosphere) and its atmosphere. Nonetheless, the encouraging thing is that both of our candidates seem to lie in the habitable zone of their star system, making them interesting targets.

As if that wasn’t enough for one day, also on the arXiv and submitted to the journal is the latest Kepler paper announcing new candidates. They include a section on Planet Hunters, and announce another handful of independent discoveries where we found candidates they’d already uncovered. More on that – including a list of Planet Hunters involved in those discoveries – in the next few days.