The Visual Survey Group: A Decade of Hunting Exoplanets and Unusual Stellar Events with Space-based Telescopes
Abstract
This article presents the history of the Visual Survey Group (VSG)-a Professional-Amateur (Pro-Am) collaboration within the field of astronomy working on data from several space missions (Kepler, K2 and Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite). This paper covers the formation of the VSG, its survey-methods including the most common tools used and its discoveries made over the past decade. So far, the group has visually surveyed nearly 10 million light curves and authored 69 peer-reviewed papers which mainly focus on exoplanets and discoveries involving multistellar systems. The preferred manual search-method carried out by the VSG has revealed its strength by detecting numerous objects which were overlooked or discarded by automated search programs, uncovering some of the most rare stars in our galaxy, and leading to several serendipitous discoveries of unprecedented astrophysical phenomena. The main purpose of the VSG is to assist in the exploration of our local universe, and we therefore advocate continued crowd-sourced examination of time-domain data sets, and invite other research teams to reach out in order to establish collaborating projects.
- Publication:
-
Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific
- Pub Date:
- July 2022
- DOI:
- 10.1088/1538-3873/ac6e06
- arXiv:
- arXiv:2205.07832
- Bibcode:
- 2022PASP..134g4401K
- Keywords:
-
- Exoplanet detection methods;
- Exoplanets;
- Transit photometry;
- Astronomy data visualization;
- History of astronomy;
- Amateur astronomy;
- Eclipsing binary stars;
- Multiple stars;
- Stellar phenomena;
- Young stellar objects;
- 489;
- 498;
- 1709;
- 1968;
- 1868;
- 35;
- 444;
- 1081;
- 1619;
- 1834;
- Astrophysics - Earth and Planetary Astrophysics;
- Astrophysics - Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics;
- Astrophysics - Solar and Stellar Astrophysics
- E-Print:
- 14 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables, accepted for publication in PASP