An Update on the TCE Review: Nearly Half Way There!

I wanted to update y’all on the status of our TCE review that we launched at the beginning of the month.

This  side project is to do our own Planet Hunters review of the ~18,000 potential transit events, dubbed Threshold Crossing Events or TCEs, identified by the Kepler team’s automated computer algorithms during a search of the first ~3 years of Kepler data. The majority are false detections, but a few are real transits due to orbiting exoplanets. A subset of the Kepler team examine the TCE list and whittle it down to make the Kepler planet candidate list. These newly released TCEs have yet to fully searched by the Kepler team, meaning there are likely discoveries waiting to be found. We have launched a Planet Hunters review of the Kepler TCEs to identify new planet candidates. For each TCE, you’ll be presented with a light curve that has been zoomed-in and folded so that the repeat transits all line up on top of each other. With the folded light curves we can see smaller planets, the rocky ones that are so hard for most of us to see in the regular light curves we show on the main Planet Hunters website. We think Planet Hunters has an advantage in the ability to review the entire TCE list (with your help) and identify not just the rocky planet transits but also the Jupiter-sized and in between. You can learn more  about the TCE list and the TCE Review by reading the launch blog post.

As of today, we’re now at the nearly half way mark towards the 184,060 classifications needed, with 7,669 of the  18,406 TCEs complete with 10 looks. For those who’ve already contributed to the TCE review, thank you for your hard work. If you’d like to join in the TCE review  and help get us to the finish line with 10 classifications for each of the 18,406 TCEs, please visit  http://tcereview.planethunters.org

Cheers,

~Meg