Planet Hunters: TESS results now on MAST
Since Planet Hunters launched in 2010, we’ve made all sorts of interesting discoveries, but apart from the occasional blog posted here you’ve had to wait until we’ve written them up in peer reviewed papers to hear about them. Such formal publication is important – it’s how information gets written into the scientific record, and how credit is recorded – but it’s slow, and this can be frustrating. It’s especially frustrating for volunteers who think they’ve found something and who then have to wait years for us to get around to doing the work required to turn a ‘maybe’ into a candidate worth publishing.
For TESS, we wanted to do something a bit different. Once candidates have been vetted they can be posted to exoFOP, where the astronomical community coordinates follow-up, but it takes quite a lot of work to get to that point.
We want to share your discoveries as quickly as possible, so today we’ve switched on a system that analyses your classifications as they come in, and when a potential planet is detected passes this information immediately to the archive which hosts TESS data, MAST. (MAST is run by a team at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, including original Zooniverse technical lead Arfon Smith).
This means that anyone can access the latest Planet Hunters data via the Planet Hunters Analysis Database – and from there go on to explore the rest of the data that might exist about the host stars and system. Volunteers get to see their results almost instantly (and get their name in an official NASA archive!), and scientists will be able to use this data to identify possible planets that they can follow up, and give credit to the citizen scientists when they do – so hopefully this new strategy will result in more Planet Hunters planets making it into the literature.
We can run Planet Hunters because the TESS team are being open with their data. We hope that being equally open with our data will encourage more people to get involved so we can find even more planets. Go see if your name is already up in lights at https://mast.stsci.edu/phad/, or get classifying to contribute to the results at www.planethunters.org!
PS The MAST team provide a set of Jupyter notebooks which support TESS data analysis. If you know a little Python, or are willing to learn, then you can get quite a long way analysing your own candidates! Get started at https://github.com/zooniverse/phad-notebook.
Planet Hunters TESS
Welcome to our new Planet Hunters TESS project!
TESS is NASA’s new Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which will spend the next two years looking for distant alien worlds. The first batch of data has only just been released by NASA and we are ready to find planets around other stars in our Galaxy. Will you join the search?
We are proudly following in the footsteps of the tremendously successful Planet Hunters project. You may have heard of this project, or even contributed to some of its amazing discoveries. Over the course of eight years they found over two-thousand planet candidates, including planetary systems that we didn’t even think possible!
The original Planet Hunters project used data from the Kepler mission, which came to an end earlier this year. But with the end of Kepler comes the beginning of TESS, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, and with that an exciting new project: Planet Hunters TESS. Throughout the mission, TESS will point its four cameras at two-hundred-thousand bright nearby stars, four-hundred times more than Kepler observed throughout its lifetime. These TESS target stars will be closer and brighter than the Kepler targets, which will allow us to more easily observe planet candidates using Earth-based telescopes. The discovery of many more worlds will further our knowledge of planet formation and evolution, and will allow us to better understand the galaxy in which we live.
But we can’t find them alone! We’ll be hunting for planets by monitoring the light given off by a star. When an planet passes, or “transits”, in front of its host star, the star momentarily dims and we see a dip in the light. This method of detecting planets has already proven to be extremely effective! Even though we can train machines to find some planets, studies have shown that human brains are excellent at detecting patterns and finding planets that automated routines miss. Together we can find the most complex, unusual and exciting planetary systems.
We’re the new Planet Hunters TESS core science team, and we’re very excited to have you join our hunt for distant worlds at www.planethunters.org.
We hope you enjoy the project!
Nora & the Planet Hunters TESS team
Hot Friends of Hot Jupiters: The WASP-47 system
Ever since a mechanical failure caused the end of the original Kepler mission in 2013, the Kepler spacecraft has been conducting a survey of new stars, searching for planets across the ecliptic plane in its new K2 mission (https://blog.planethunters.org/2014/12/12/more-about-the-k2-campaign-0/). The K2 dataset is a goldmine of fascinating science results. One such result is the recent discovery of two new planets in the WASP-47 system.
Until a few months ago, everyone knew that hot Jupiter planets don’t have “friends”, or nearby small planets in close orbits to the host star. These other planets had been searched for extensively, through radial velocity measurements, analysis of the transit times of the hot Jupiters, and even through transits by Kepler during its original mission. All of these searches turned up nothing.
This all changed one day last July, when Hans Martin Schwengeler, a Planet Hunter who enjoys poring over Kepler and K2 data searching for new transiting planets by eye, came across the telltale signatures of two extra transiting planets in the hot Jupiter system WASP-47. WASP 47b was, by all indications, a perfectly normal hot Jupiter — in the discovery paper, Coel Hellier wrote “With an orbital period of 4.16 days, a mass of 1.14 Jupiter masses, and a radius of 1.15 Jupiter radii, WASP-47b is an entirely typical hot Jupiter”. The discovery of additional transiting planets dramatically changed the narrative.
When Hans came across the planets, he posted them to the Planet Hunters forum, where he and other citizen scientists discuss their findings. Andrew Vanderburg came across the post suggesting that a known hot Jupiter had planetary companions. Using his K2 data reduction pipeline (https://blog.planethunters.org/2015/01/08/a-recipe-for-making-a-k2-light-curve/), he analyzed the light curve and confirmed Hans’s discovery – there were additional planets in the system, a super-Earth at a 0.8 day period and a Neptune at a 9 day period!
Andrew emailed me, and at first I hardly believed that the lightcurve was real. How could a hot Jupiter have close-in planetary companions? I knew people had been looking for this type of companion for years via both photometry and transit timing variations, but the lack of discoveries indicated that they might not exist. I performed some numerical stability simulations (because it seemed at first like this system could not be dynamically stable!) and sure enough, the N-body simulations showed that the system was likely stable on timescales of 10 million years.
At that point, we formed a team with Hans, Andrew, MIT Professor Saul Rappaport, University of Michigan Professor Fred Adams (my advisor!), and me. Once this team was formed, we devoted ourselves to understanding as much about the systems as we could. Some work by Saul and Andrew confirmed that the planets were all orbiting the same star, Andrew fit the lightcurve to get the planet properties, and I ran more stability simulations. Soon enough, Fred suggested that I look at what transit timing variations (or TTVs, which happen when transits come late or early because of the gravity of other planets in the system) we would theoretically expect to see from the system – and I found that for the outer two planets, the TTVs should be observable.
I then measured the TTVs from the lightcurve, and sure enough – there was something there. After some discussion, we realized we could measure the masses of the planets from those TTVs! Though I had never done dynamical fits before, I wrote the code to utilize Kat Deck’s TTVFAST code in a Markov Chain Monte Carlo fit. With some advice from Kat and help from Fred, I eventually got the fits working and we were able to measure or put limits on the masses of each planet.
In a little less than two weeks, we had put together a paper deriving planet properties from the lightcurve, mass limits from the TTVs, and showing that you CAN detect companions to hot Jupiters using TTVs!
This result is exciting because it is the very first time a hot Jupiter has been found to have such close-in other planets. Before this discovery, it was unclear if hot Jupiter could have nearby friends, as they might destabilize the friends’ orbits during migration. This discovery opens up new questions about how these systems form – it is possible that there is more than one migration mechanism for hot Jupiters.
The paper on WASP-47 and its new companions, which was published earlier this week in ApJ Letters and is available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.02411, was a collaboration between myself (Juliette Becker, a graduate student at the University of Michigan), graduate student Andrew Vanderburg (Harvard CfA), Professor Fred Adams (the University of Michigan), Professor Saul Rappaport (MIT), and Hans Schwengeler (a citizen scientist).
Comets or Aliens?
Let’s deal with the big question first. Has Planet Hunters discovered aliens?
The answer is no. But that doesn’t mean that all of the press who have written about us in the last 48 hours, sending a flood of volunteers to the site, are completely misguided. Let me backtrack…
A few weeks ago we submitted the ninth planet hunters paper to the journal, and that paper is now available on the arXiv service. Led by Tabetha Boyajian at Yale, it describes a rather unusual system (what the Atlantic called the most interesting star in the Galaxy), which was identified by Planet Hunters, four of whom (Daryll, Kian, Abe, Sam) are named on the paper*. They spotted a series of transits – which is normally what signifies the presence of a planet – but these were unusual.
The star’s light dimmed for a long period of time, loosing a fifth of its brightness for days or even months at a time. More mysteriously, the duration of the dips was not always the same, so this couldn’t possibly be a planet. This behaviour is unique amongst the more than a hundred thousand stars studied by Kepler – we have a bone fide mystery on our hands.I think the team’s immediate thoughts were that it must be the star itself that’s misbehaving, but stars aren’t known to behave like this and some careful follow up reveals it to be nothing more than a normal F-type star, slightly hotter and more massive than the Sun. So it’s not the star, and we’re sure too that it’s not Kepler itself misbehaving; something is really blocking the light from this star.One option is a disk of dust around the star. It’s from such disks that planets form (see DiskDetectives.org for more on this!) and so that wouldn’t be too surprising. Yet enough dust to cause the deep eclipses we see would glow brightly in the infrared, and there’s no sign of a strong infrared source around this star.
You can read the paper to find out what else we considered, but we think the best explanation is that there is a group of exocomets in orbit around the star. Comets are an appealing scenario to invoke because they would be faint in the infrared, and because they move on elliptical orbits, accounting for the random timing of the transits and their different lengths. Such a group of comets could have come from the breakup of a larger object, leaving a cloud of smaller remnants in similar orbits behind.
Much detailed work is needed to flesh out the details of this (pleasingly outlandish!) scenario. One possibility is that the recent passage of a nearby star triggered the cometary bombardment whose effects we’re seeing. The paper is currently in the peer review process and there is – of course – the possibility that there is a perfectly sensible solution we haven’t yet considered. However, so far over 100 professional scientists have had a look at the lightcurves and not managed to come up with a working solution.
One other proposed theory is that this pattern of behaviour is due to a fleet of alien spaceships in orbit around a star, a possibility considered by Jason Wright and collaborators here. Jason and co were tipped off about our discovery by the team, and it’s included in their paper as an object with ‘a bizarre light curve consistent with a “swarm” of megastructures’, much to the excitement of much of the internet. ‘Consistent with’ isn’t the same as ‘definitely is’, of course – and personally, my money is very firmly on the comet theory with a side bet on weird stellar behaviour – but until those models are properly investigated alien spaceships remain a possibility. The Wright paper points out this star is now a supremely interesting target for SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence), and we agree – I hope radio astronomers will go and listen for signals. We need more observations of transits in action, too, and will be trying to follow-up to try and work out what’s actually going on.In the meantime, who knows what else is lurking in the Kepler data? Planet Hunters is about finding planets, but this ability to identify the weird and unusual is one of the project’s great advantages. Get clicking at www.planethunters.org, and let us know through Talk if you find anything a little odd.
Chris
* – This isn’t the final version of the paper, and we have more names to mention too before we’re done.
Extracted Lightcurves From Vanderburg & Johnson (2014) Now Available at MAST
A new MAST High Level Science Product from K2 has been delivered that includes extracted lightcurves. Courtesy of Vanderburg & Johnson (2014), long-cadence targets from Campaigns 0 and 1 now have detrended, extracted lightcurves available at MAST, including 20 different photometric apertures. There’s a MAST Classic Search Interface so you can get lightcurves based on target IDs, coordinates, EPIC catalog fluxes, etc. You can also use our interactive plotter to explore the lightcurves using any of the photometric apertures before downloading the FITS files. Check out all the details here: http://archive.stsci.edu/prepds/k2sff/
Kepler 2.0
It’s up!
The first science data from the new Kepler K2 mission is up on Planet Hunters just waiting to be looked at for new planets, eclipsing binaries, and whatever else lies in the data. This is a set of completely new stars! (Check out the K2 page for more information about the K2 mission.)
This data may go fast, so get classifying now! But don’t worry, there will be more K2 data when the next quarter is released. And when each K2 quarter is finished, keep classifying stars from the four-year Kepler mission to help solve one of the biggest mysteries in astronomy: how common are planets?
– Joey
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 