BBC Stargazing Live
NASA’s Kepler spacecraft monitors ~150,000 stars for transit signatures taking a measurement every 30 minutes.The Kepler light curves, the time series of brightness measurements, are complex. Many exhibit short-‐lived variations in brightness. Such variability is difficult to characterize. Using computer algorithms, the Kepler team has detected over 2,000 potential planet candidates and 33 confirmed planetary systems. Despite the impressive success of the Kepler Team’s automated analysis, we think that computers may not recognize transit signals dominated by the natural variability of the star.
Computers are only good at finding what they’ve been told to look for. The human eye can easily identify deviant points and transits that may be missed by sophisticated computer algorithms. 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 asking you to visually screen the Kepler light curves for transits, individually reviewing 30-day segments of a star’s light curve for tell-tale transit dips signaling the possible presence of a exoplanet. Over 73,000 volunteers have made nearly 6 million classifications in the project’s first year. We’ve already netted 4 strong planet candidates (read more about those discoveries here and here) that were missed in initial reviews in other searches of the Kepler data.
But we need your help. The Kepler team has just released the next 3 quarters of Kepler data, nearly 270 days worth of additional observations to the public. Chris issued the challenge today; help us search the data for new planet transit signals over the next three days of Stargazing. Mark where you think there might be dips in star light due to passing planets. We’ll review all your classifications and look for new planet candidates and on the last night we’ll preset what we find . Help us make our goal of 250,000 classifications in 48 hours.
These Kepler observations have never before been seen by anyone on the Planet Hunters website. Most of the light curves 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?
Happy Hunting,
~Meg, Chris and the Planet Hunters Team
Don’t forget that you can ask questions and talk about the lightcurves you’ve seen on our Planet Hunters Talk site , on our blog , on Twitter, and on Facebook.
PS. For comments for Stargazing Live – come to our Live Blog Post
A Good Start to 2012
Happy New Year and Happy 2012 Everyone –
We’ve got lots in store for 2012. I wanted to give you a quick update on what the team’s been up to. We’re still notifying winners of the Anniversary Competition and waiting to hear back from some of the winners. So we’ll announce the remaining winners soon. We hope to start mailing prizes in a couple of weeks once I’m back from travel and conferences.
January is turning out to be a busy month.We’ve got papers in the works, including my short period planet analysis paper from all your classifications from Q1. I hope to have a finished draft in the next few weeks. Watch this space to hear more about the papers in the upcoming weeks as we ready them for journal submission.
Next week is the American Astronomical Society‘s annual winter meeting. This year the meeting will be held in Austin, Texas. Chris, Kevin, and I will be attending the meeting with mugs of garcinia cambogia coffee in hand. If you’re interested in following the news from the conference on twitter – you can follow Chris, Kevin, and I (@chrislintott , @kevinschawinski ,and @megschwamb ) and the twitter hashtag #AAS219 . We’ll also be tweeting from the @planethunters account as well.
Chris will be talking about the latest Planet Hunters results on Monday in the Exoplanets: New Surveys session. The talks are short, only 5 minutes to speak and show slides with a few minutes for questions. So we’ll be showing just the latest science highlights from the project. Kevin and I will also be giving talks on other unrelated projects we’ve been working on. I’ll be talking about my survey to search the southern skies for large Kuiper belt objects, but I’ll also be giving a talk on Planet Hunters next week but not at the AAS. The annual symposium for the National Science Foundation (NSF) Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellows is right before the AAS meeting in Austin. My symposium talk on Sunday will be about Planet Hunters.
Also up next, is the next data release. With the accelerated data release schedule from the Kepler team, we’re going to get not just one quarter but 3! Quarters 4,5,and 6 are scheduled right now to be released this weekend. That’s about 1.25 years worth of Kepler data (Quarters 1-6) in total will be in the public archive. I’m excited to see what unknown planets may be lurking there just waiting to be found. We’ll keep you updated on the process of the upload and when the data will be available on the site.
A good start to 2012 indeed,
~Meg
Happy B-day PlanetHunters!
It’s hard to believe that the first year has flown by and I would like to thank you and congratulate you on your many successes! You may not realize it, but you are becoming famous among professional astronomers who appreciate the power of networked citizen scientists. The total time that you all spent collectively analyzing light curves in the past year adds up to more than 100 years!
In the last year we’ve seen:
- improvements in the usability of the site
- growth in the number of users: there are now more than 70,000 PlanetHunters!
- increases in the data content: from 1 month to 4 months of light curve data
- publication of one paper with PlanetHunters users as co-authors – the Kepler computer algorithms are good, but you are discovering planets that the computers miss.
There are some big changes ahead. NASA and the Kepler team will be accelerating the release of data into the public archives. By this time next year, we expect that the length of the time series light curves on the PlanetHunters site will more than quadruple. At this point will will be receiving the data almost real-time!
I would also like to thank the Kepler team. The Kepler spacecraft was launched in March 2009 and although the nominal mission ends in 2012, the spacecraft will continue to beam data back to Earth until 2015. However, financial pressures have already resulted in cuts to the Kepler science team. It’s not clear that anyone will be left after next year to receive the messages that Kepler is sending back about planets in Earth-like orbits. Whatever happens, the Kepler team has profoundly changed our understanding of the Universe and I know that I speak for the more than 70,000 PlanetHunters in thanking them for their dedication and hard work.
Anniversary Competition Winners Round 1
It’s amazing how fast the year has gone by. It only seems like it was last December, and we were just getting ready to launch Planet Hunters. To celebrate our first year birthday, we’re hosting a give away competition. This is our small way of saying thank you for all of your clicks and support over the past year. All you need to do is log in and classify light curves- and you will be instantly registered for the drawing. Each day between now and December 16th, we’ll pick a name from the day’s classifiers.
I’m happy to announce the first four winners from our drawing:
December 1st – Lukasz Lupa prize – prize: Planet Hunters poster
December 2nd- Garry Williams – prize: Planet Hunters mug
December 3rd – Frank Barnet – prize: Planet Hunters mug
December 4th – Mattijis Weggen – prize: Planet Hunters poster
Congratulations to all the winners. We’ll keep selecting winners daily from now until December 16th. Good luck and Happy Hunting,
~Meg
Words
This world cloud shows the first Planet Hunters paper – outlining the discovery of two planet candidates – as a ball of words. You might call it a Word Planet, in fact. The words used most often in the paper are the largest, such as transit (81 times), planet (71) and Kepler (51), whereas less-used words shrink away to the edges, such as SNR (5), technology (2) and faint (3).
This was created for the 2011 Zooniverse Advent Calendar. Download the full-resolution version here.
Welcoming Polish Planet Hunters
The Polish language version of Planet Hunters is now available. The creation of the first foreign language version of the project reflects our determination to make Zooniverse sites accessible to as many peoples possible, all over the world. The fact that the first foreign language version is Polish is not an accident. Many years ago, at the beginning of the Galaxy Zoo project, a determined bunch of science enthusiasts from Poland joined with the Galaxy Zoo team to create the very first international language version. They have been working with the Zooniverse ever since!
Planet Hunters in Polish was supported by Lech Mankiewicz from the Polish Academy of Science, Jan Pomierny from Polish astronomy portal Astronomia.pl and Mirek Kolodziej, an engineering student and astronomy enthusiast. Polish citizen scientists have now joined the worldwide community of planet hunters – welcome!
Thanks to the hard work of the team, this means we can now expect Planet Hunters to be available in other languages too. Watch this space!
Anniversary Competition
Before long Planet Hunters will be one year old – we launched on December 16th 2010. It’s been an incredible journey that began with a wild idea and resulted in new planets being discovered by people from allover the world. (The site became available in Polish last week, meaning that even more people can now become planet hunters in their spare time.)
To celebrate a year of amazing citizen science we’ve decided to host a little competition! Every day until Planet Hunters’ birthday on December 16th we’re picking one random classification and that user is getting a prize! All you have to do is classify on Planet Hunters on any day until December 16th to be part of the prize draw. We’ll announce winners, once they’ve been contacted, via the blog and twitter.
Each lucky planet hunter will win either a printed anniversary poster (featuring the names of all our volunteers, see sample above) or an awesome Planet Hunters mug. We’ll get in touch using the email address associated with your Zooniverse account, with you can check in the Account section of Zooniverse Home. The random planet hunter who logs in on our actual anniversary will win a mug, poster and a bonus Yale University mug too!
Good luck and happy planet hunting!
[If you can’t wait, you can download the poster here – warning it’s a 66 MB file.]
A word from planet hunter Geoff Marcy
Dear Planet Hunters,
The Planet Hunters project has found a gold mine! I am so impressed at the planet candidates rolling out of Planet Hunters. This project shows the human ability at pattern recognition can compete with modern, parallel-processing computers. The human eyeball (and brain) can still give a massive computer a run for its money.
How can PH humans compete head-to-head against NASA computers? I really don’t know. I imagine that the subtle, unpredictable quirks and complexities in the photometry of 156,000 stars presents challenges native to our ancient brains. Perhaps our hominid ancestors, so vulnerable to predators, had to survey the African savannah quickly and accurately, to detect the barely discernible signs of trouble. Every sunset two million years ago, our ancestors would routinely venture out to forage. If you missed a distant saber tooth silhouetted as it transited the setting sun, you might become that evening’s appetizer. If so, Planet Hunters is reaching back to our roots, to our native strengths. And in so doing, future destinations in humanity’s exploration of the cosmic savannah are being discovered.
Congratulations, Best Wishes, and Keep going!
Geoff Marcy
Updated Planet Candidates List and Q3 data
Hi all,
We’ve just updated the Candidates List to reflect what we’ve learned from Q1 and from a preliminary look through the Q2 data so far. Some candidates from Q1 have survived, others have not. Each of these candidates looks promising to us and not on the list of known candidates released by the Kepler team. These are possible planet candidates, that is, as far as we can tell, they look good and we think are not eclipsing binaries or false positives. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that these stars have planets. A minimum of three separate observed transits are needed as well as follow-up observations. From our first paper, you can see that after checking through everything only two of the top 10 we looked at turned out to be good. Many on the list might not turn out to be real planet transits, but their appearance on our list means we think we’re on the right track. We will continue to follow-up and vet these candidates with observations from the Keck telescopes and other checks to try and rule out possible false positives.
We’re also keeping track of discovery credit. The names of those lucky hunters who are in line to make discoveries are listed on the candidates page as well. We have a full record in our database of what everyone did. Additionally, some of our candidates came from light curves that were highlighted in Talk, and we will be giving credit to those users who helped alert our attention to those light curves (we plan to have their names added soon on the Candidates List).
In other news, the Kepler team announced that the next public release of data has been moved up from June 2012 to yesterday . Quarter 3 is an extra 90 days of observations, nearly doubling the time baseline we have available for all the Kepler stars – meaning you can find even longer period planets hidden in the data! With the addition of Q3, we now have 210 days worth of Kepler data for ~150,000 stars. The team is hard at work making preparations for the new data, which included assembling the new candidates list. In the mean time, there’s still lots of Quarter 2 data left to search through, and the science team is continuing to search for transits in the Quarter 2 data with your classifications and Talk posts.
We are currently downloading the Q3 data, and Meg is heading out to the folks at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago early next week to help check out the new data and help plan the Q3 upload with our amazing Zooniverse developers who keep the Planet Hunters site going. Our goal is to get the data served to you as quickly as possible with minimal interruptions to the site. We’ll keep you posted on the progress of the Q3 upload. So stay tuned!And thanks for all the clicks!
Q3 Data Release Annoucement
The Kepler team announced yesterday the release of Q3 data has moved up from June 2012 to September 23rd. Q3 is about 90 days of additional data (bringing the time baseline to about 210 days). The press release also mentions Planet Hunters by name (thanks Kepler team!).
We just heard the news yesterday, so we’re starting to discuss and plan now about how to get the data uploaded quickly and take the lessons learned from the last two uploads. We’ll keep you posted as we know more about Q3 and what our plans for PH are. There’s still lots of Q2 data left to go through in the meantime.
Happy Hunting,
~Meg
Planet Hunters 
