Planet Hunters in the Kepler Extended Mission
Abstract
Planet Hunters (http://www.planethunters.org), part of the Zooniverse's (http://www.zooniverse.org) collection of online citizen science projects, uses the World Wide Web to enlist the general public to identify transits in the Kepler light curves. Volunteers are asked to draw boxes to mark the locations of visible transits, with multiple independent classifiers reviewing a randomly selected ~30-day light curve segment from one of Kepler's ~160,000 target stars. Since December 2010, more than 170,000 members of the general public have participated in Planet Hunters contributing over 13 million classifications. With the start of the Kepler extended mission, Planet Hunters has entered a new phase. We will detail the upgrades and new features added to the project, highlighting in particular our search for circumbinary planets (planets orbiting both stars in binary) in the the extended mission Quarterly data releases. We will also report on our latest planet candidates, including the characterization of our first confirmed planet candidate, a circumbinary planet in a four star system. Acknowledgements: MES is supported by a National Science Foundation Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship under award AST-1003258 and in part by an American Philosophical Society Franklin Grant.
- Publication:
-
American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #221
- Pub Date:
- January 2013
- Bibcode:
- 2013AAS...22131501S