* Astronomy

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RE: Planet Hunters project

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Title: Planet Hunters: New Kepler planet candidates from analysis of quarter 2
Authors: Chris Lintott, Megan E. Schawmb, Charlie Sharzer, Debra A. Fisher, Thomas Barclay, Michael Parrish, Natalie Batalha, Steve Bryson, Jon Jenkins, Darin Ragozzine, Jason F. Rowe, Kevin Schawinski, Rovert Gagliano, Joe Gilardi, Kian J. Jek, Jari-Pekka Pääkkönen, Tjapko Smits

We present new planet candidates identified in NASA Kepler quarter two public release data by volunteers engaged in the Planet Hunters citizen science project. The two candidates presented here survive checks for false-positives, including examination of the pixel offset to constrain the possibility of a background eclipsing binary. The orbital periods of the planet candidates are 97.46 days (KIC 4552729) and 284.03 (KIC 10005758) days and the modelled planet radii are 5.3 and 3.790 Earth radii. The latter star has an additional known planet candidate with a radius of 5.05 Earth radii and a period of 134.49 which was detected by the Kepler pipeline. The discovery of these candidates illustrates the value of massively distributed volunteer review of the Kepler database to recover candidates which were otherwise uncatalogued.

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Members of the public are being asked to join the hunt for nearby planets that could support life.
Volunteers can go to the Planethunters website to see time-lapsed images of 150,000 stars, taken by the Kepler space telescope.
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Can you find a new planet?

Nine months ago, Today programme listeners were asked to help scientists look for new planets.
Dr Chris Lintott, astronomer and a member of Planet Hunters, welcomes the news that two planets have been discovered.
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Title: Planet Hunters: The First Two Planet Candidates Identified by the Public using the Kepler Public Archive Data
Authors: 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

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 modelling 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 Â±0.0087 days (KIC 10905746) and 49.7696 Â±0.00039 (KIC 6185331) days and the modelled planet radii are 2.65 and 8.05 Râ. The involvement of citizen scientists as part of Planet Hunters is therefore shown to be a valuable and reliable tool in exoplanet detection.

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Citizen Scientists, Kepler and Keck Uncover New Planets

Astronomers at Yale University have announced the discovery of the first two potential exoplanets found by the online citizen scientist Planet Hunters program. Users of the Planet Hunters program analyse scientific data collected by NASA's Kepler mission to assist astronomers in finding planets orbiting nearby stars. The most likely exoplanet candidates are then studied using the 10-meter telescopes of the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii to confirm the planets' existence.
Since the online citizen science project Planet Hunters launched last December, 40,000 web users from around the world have been helping professional astronomers analyse the light from 150,000 stars in the hopes of discovering Earth-like planets orbiting around them. A new study on the discovery is slated to be published (when?) in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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When it comes to hunting alien planets, if you want something done - as the old adage goes - you should do it yourself.
NASA's Kepler space satellite may have revolutionised the search for alien planets, but none of it would have been possible without the help of home-grown space geeks.
Veteran planet hunter Professor Debra Fischer, an astronomer at Yale university and Kepler project scientist and Kevin Schawinski, an Einstein fellow at Yale University and co-founder of Galaxy Zoo, have founded PlanetHunters.org.
It's a website that allows anyone with a computer to spot alien worlds the mission's software may have missed.
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Hunting for Planets from the Comfort of Your Own Home

In the two years since it went into space, the Kepler satellite has revolutionised the search for planets around other stars. Before Kepler went into space, about 500 so-called exoplanets had been found, one by painstaking one over the course of more than a decade. Since then, Kepler has added another 1,200, and that's just a fraction of the planets the probe will ultimately discover. (To be technical, the bodies Kepler finds are known as "candidate planets" that need confirmation, but no one doubts that the vast majority of them are real.)
But while computers are terrific at high-volume data-processing, nothing beats the human eye for pattern-recognition - which is why a project dreamed up by Yale University astronomer Debra Fischer, a veteran planet hunter and Kepler project scientist, has turned out to be so extraordinarily useful. Called Planethunters.org, it lets ordinary folks with no scientific training at all help find planets the Kepler software has missed.
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Volunteers to hunt for 'lost planets'

The public are being asked to help Oxford University astronomers find planets orbiting other stars which may have been 'lost' in the data from over 100,000 stars.
NASA's Kepler space observatory has been staring at the same patch of sky for 18 months sending back thousands of images of stars. Now planethunters.org is inviting web users to search for dips in the brightness of these stars which might indicate an extra-solar planet ('exoplanet') passing between the star and us.
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Citizen Scientists Join Search for Earth-like Planets

Web users around the globe will be able to help professional astronomers in their search for Earth-like planets thanks to a new online citizen science project called Planet Hunters that launches Dec. 16. at www.planethunters.org.

Planet Hunters, which is the latest in the Zooniverse citizen science project collection, will ask users to help analyze data taken by NASA's Kepler mission. The space telescope has been searching for planets beyond our own solar system - called exoplanets - since its launch in March 2009.