Comments on: Two exoplanets discovered by “citizen scientists”

By: You, Too, Can Be A Planet Hunter! | PaleBlueBlog.org

You, Too, Can Be A Planet Hunter! | PaleBlueBlog.org — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 06:37:37 +0000

[...] “Citizen-scientists” recently discovered two planets overlooked by the professionals. [...]

By: Sceptici în România – Episodul 27 - Sceptici în România

Sceptici în România – Episodul 27 - Sceptici în România — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 11:12:41 +0000

[...] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/09/22/two-exoplanets-discovered-by-citizen-scien... [...]

By: The Dawn of the Age of the Citizen Scientist | AltDaily : Creating and celebrating local culture in Norfolk and all of Hampton Roads.

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 15:25:55 +0000

[...] discoveries! Help the Kepler space probe analyze data and find exoplanets. Just this last week citizen scientists extracted two new planets that were hiding in the data of this very project. Other projects are helping guide the New Horizion probe by finding ice in the [...]

By: Crowd-sourcing Science: Planet Hunters find two new planet candidates « astrobites

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 11:15:43 +0000

[...] interns — is crucial for the future of astronomical research. And judging from the dozens of blog and news articles published last week, everyone gets very excited about the possibility of [...]

By: Messier Tidy Upper

Messier Tidy Upper — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 11:05:15 +0000

@1. Squidocto, (#10.) mig500 & ^ Eimear & the others involved in discovering new found worlds :

Congratulations!

Well done!

[Raises beer in celebration salute.]

By: Eimear

Eimear — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 18:13:56 +0000

I also tagged a planet. Very satisfying felling if I must say so, I would encourage more people to spend some time on the planet hunter site. Its not just finding planets that are fun, there are some really interesting light curves to be seen.

By: Joseph G

Joseph G — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 06:40:28 +0000

@Squidocto: Congratulations!!
I tried my hand at that and couldn’t make heads or tails of anything I saw.I’d never have seen te pattern in that first graph in a million years

By: Kim

Kim — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 00:07:49 +0000

Food for imagination: inhabitants of those planets can detect the Earth as well, as we are on the same plane. Hopefully, they’ll be glad to find us as we are to find them.

By: mig500

mig500 — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 22:59:24 +0000

Another citizen scientist here. I have flaged the 2 planets )) So Happy!!!

By: CoffeeCupContrails

CoffeeCupContrails — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 22:33:14 +0000

Note to amateur self: Gaps in Kepler data most likely means (just checked: yes it is) end of some observation period. That’s not a huge planet with a weird orbit. Now get back to work – that wheel won’t spin itself.

By: Ron Richter

Ron Richter — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 20:16:58 +0000

The picture is a great example of chromostereopsis!

Stare at it for a second or two

By: Brian Schmidt

Brian Schmidt — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 19:58:39 +0000

From the linked paper it sounds like they just examined the top 10 candidates of the top 45. Sounds like it would be worthwhile to look at the remaining 35.

By: jimthompson

jimthompson — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 19:46:07 +0000

While this is a great and exciting thing for the Planet Hunters, another, less optimistic way to look at it is as a failure of the Kepler team’s processing pipeline. Both these objects were initially flagged by that software, at high signal to noise, but, for various reasons (some as yet unexplained) these objects were later dropped and not further analyzed. The Planet Hunters had a high false positive rate of at least 60%, though this was not unexpected. This suggests that perhaps a more efficient way of combing the database is to put human eyeballs on THAT list of stars: those initially flagged but later dropped by the Kepler processing pipeline. Certainly that would have easily detected the planet with the near 50 day orbit. One has to suspect that such a plan might already be in use, which would make any future discoveries by the Planet Hunters, unfortunately, considerably less likely.

By: jimthompson

jimthompson — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 18:36:51 +0000

Nice catch by the amateur planet hunters, but there’s a mistake in the post: “it’s because the star was thought to be a giant near the end of its life, making followup observations and analysis too difficult.” is incorrect. The reason giants are avoided is because transits of them, of the depth typical of planets, would be made by STARS, not planets. While Kepler has found over a thousand eclipsing binaries and they are being well studied, such an eclipsing system counts as a “false positive” when searching for planetary transits.

By: Beau

Beau — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 17:12:42 +0000

I sometimes log into Planet Hunters just to give it a go in the hopes that I could actually help in discovering a new planet. I’m glad some people actually did.

Sifting through all that data gets a bit tiring though.

By: Larian LeQuella

Larian LeQuella — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 17:01:50 +0000

Congratulations Squidocto! You are living a fantasy/dream of mine.

And for some even more cool perspective on these discoveries, here is a StackExchange Question and Answer regarding the chances that a system will actually be edge on enough for us to measure these dips. As I say in the answer that I gave to that question, Kepler has been up there for a short while, and has a possible list of nearly 2000 planets just looking at about 150,000 stars for only a couple of years! So if only 1% statistically transit, that would mean that just randomly 1500 systems would have the correct orientation (given the results to date, that makes sense). And given that about 7500 stars were eliminated from consideration due to being variable of one sort or another… I think it would be pretty safe to say that pretty much every star out there has at least some sort of planetary body around it.

By: Chris lintott

Chris lintott — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 16:33:14 +0000

Thanks Phil! Just a note to say although many of the coauthors are from the Kepler team, it’s led by our slightly independent planet hunters team from Yale, Oxford and Adler.

By: Squidocto

Squidocto — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 16:30:41 +0000

I’m in that paper as one of the citizen scientists, and I can’t overstate how exciting it is for me. It’s really such a small thing, but being a tiny part of the team makes me feel directly connected to the incredible, ongoing journey of scientific discovery.