Since Planet Hunters launched in 2010, we’ve made all sorts of interesting discoveries, but apart from the occasional blog posted here you’ve had to wait until we’ve written them up in peer reviewed papers to hear about them. Such formal publication is important – it’s how information gets written into the scientific record, and how credit is recorded – but it’s slow, and this can be frustrating. It’s especially frustrating for volunteers who think they’ve found something and

Ever since a mechanical failure caused the end of the original Kepler mission in 2013, the Kepler spacecraft has been conducting a survey of new stars, searching for planets across the ecliptic plane in its new K2 mission (http://blog.planethunters.org/2014/12/12/more-about-the-k2-campaign-0/). The K2 dataset is a goldmine of fascinating science results. One such result is the recent discovery of two new planets in the WASP-47 system. Until a few months ago, everyone knew tha

Let’s deal with the big question first. Has Planet Hunters discovered aliens? The answer is no. But that doesn’t mean that all of the press who have written about us in the last 48 hours, sending a flood of volunteers to the site, are completely misguided. Let me backtrack… A few weeks ago we submitted the ninth planet hunters paper to the journal, and that paper is now available on the arXiv service. Led by Tabetha Boyajian at Yale, it describes a rather unusual system (what

It’s up! The first science data from the new Kepler K2 mission is up on Planet Hunters just waiting to be looked at for new planets, eclipsing binaries, and whatever else lies in the data. This is a set of completely new stars! (Check out the K2 page for more information about the K2 mission.) This data may go fast, so get classifying now! But don’t worry, there will be more K2 data when the next quarter is released. And when each K2 quarter is finished, keep classifying star

As I write this blog post, the transit of Venus is ongoing, with Venus finishing  its slow march across the face of the Sun in less than an hour. The next time this will event will come around will be well after out life times in December 2117. The internet has been abuzz with these breathtaking images of the transit from all over the world from space telescopes,ground-based telescopes, even iphones strapped to solar eclipse glasses(!). I wanted to share my impressions of the

I’ll start by introducing myself as I’m not involved in Planethunters, but Meg asked me if I could write an article for you here about the Transit of Venus after I mentioned on Twitter that I was enjoying researching the topic for a talk I’m giving. I’m a Research Fellow at the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth/SEPNet (South East Physics Network), and I’m funded by The Leverhulme Trust as an Early Career Fellow to work on Galaxy Zoo scienc

By Zak Kaplan (Yale undergrad) Planet Hunters has just completed its first analysis of the Kepler data! With your classifications, we were able to extract information about all of the 150,000 light curves. We would like to thank the more than 16,000 registered users who have helped make Planet Hunters such a success. Special thanks to the collectors and the top 14 users who each analyzed over 5000 light curves, accounting for over 10% of the 1.3 million classifications. To gi

It’s Christmas Eve and I’m starting a five-night observing run at the Keck Telescope using a high-resolution spectrograph (HIRES) to search for exoplanets. In the photo here, I am communicating with the telescope operator, Terry, by polycom. He is on the summit of Mauna Kea at 14,000 ft where the air is thin and I see that he has oxygen flowing. I’m glad that I’m working in comfort at Keck HQ in Waimea. Tonight, I’m using the Doppler technique to measure the velocities of sta

Hi I’m Matt, a graduate student at Yale University and a member of the Science Team. We’re really impressed with the turnout so far on planethunters.org and users have already pointed out some really amazing objects! Quite a few people have asked for some clarification on what transits look like, so I’ll address that in this post. In the figure above, we’ve taken a Kepler light curve from a star that’s about the same size as the Sun and have simulated what the effects would b