1 research outputs found
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 \pm0.0087 days (KIC
10905746) and 49.7696 \pm0.00039 (KIC 6185331) days and the modeled planet
radii are 2.65 and 8.05 R\oplus. The involvement of citizen scientists as part
of Planet Hunters is therefore shown to be a valuable and reliable tool in
exoplanet detection.Comment: Submitted to MNRAS, added 1 line to table