Planet Hunters: The First Two Planet Candidates Identified by the Public using the Kepler Public Archive Data
Planet Hunters is a new citizen science project, designed to engage the public in an exoplanet search using NASA Kepler public release data. In the first month after launch, users identified two new planet candidates which survived our checks for false- positives. The follow-up effort included analysis of Keck HIRES spectra of the host stars, analysis of pixel centroid offsets in the Kepler data and adaptive optics imaging at Keck using NIRC2.
Spectral synthesis modeling coupled with stellar evolutionary models yields a stellar density distribution, which is used to model the transit orbit. The orbital periods of the planet candidates are 9.8844 A+/-0.0087 days (KIC 10905746) and 49.7696 A+/-0.00039 (KIC 6185331) days and the modeled planet radii are 2.65 and 8.05 Ra. The involvement of citizen scientists as part of Planet Hunters is therefore shown to be a valuable and reliable tool in exoplanet detection.
Debra Fisher, Megan Schwamb, Kevin Schawinski, Chris Lintott, John Brewer, Matt Giguere, Stuart Lynn, Michael Parrish, Thibault Sartori, Robert Simpson, Arfon Smith, Julien Spronck, Natalie Batalha, Jason Rowe, Jon Jenkins, Steve Bryson, Andrej Prsa, Peter Tenenbaum, Justin Crepp, Tim Morton, Andrew Howard, Michele Beleu, Zachary Kaplan, Nick vanNispen, Charlie Sharzer, Justin DeFouw, Agnieszka Hajduk, Joe Neal, Adam Nemec, Nadine Schuepbach, Valerij Zimmermann
(Submitted on 21 Sep 2011)
Comments: Submitted to MNRAS
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as: arXiv:1109.4621v1 [astro-ph.EP]
Submission history
From: Chris Lintott [view email]
[v1] Wed, 21 Sep 2011 19:45:11 GMT (4245kb,D)
