Hi,
I wanted to give a brief update on the short period planets paper that just recently got accepted to Astrophysical Journal. Once you’ve gone through the referee process and the paper gets accepted. You go through the editorial stage of the paper where the journal formats your paper into the nice two column format of the journal and puts your figures into the text so that everything looks seamless and coherent. On top of that, a copy editor reads your paper searching and correcting for typos, grammatical errors, and formatting errors. Once this has been done, you receive the proofs of your paper, what it will look like in the final print version in the general. One version, the ‘redline’ copy, highlights the corrections and changes from the copy editor and the other shows how the paper will look in journal format including where all the figures will be positioned. So I just got the proofs for my paper a few days, and I’ve gone through and checked the copy editor’s modifications. For the ones I disagree with, I can submit a response explaining my reasoning and those edits may be modified. Now that the proofs are in and reviewed, the next step is publication (expected to be formally in August). The paper is online in pre-print format so everyone can read the results early, but the publishing in the journal is considered the official stamp of approval that the publication is scientifically valid and that the results have been peer-reviewed.
So what’s next? We’ll right now I’m working on some observing follow-up of our highest priority planet candidates. We’ve been getting follow-up observations to help study and confirm if these are real planet transits. I was helping to observe on the Keck telescopes Monday and Tuesday nights (Hawaiian time). I didn’t get to be go out Hawaii or Mauna Kea. I was observing remotely from the comforts of home (well, the Yale Keck remote observing run across from my office in New Haven). So Tuesday and Wednesday morning on the East coast I was helping to drive the Keck I around and take high resolution spectra including observations of a Planet Hunters candidate or two. Additionally, we’re looking for new planet candidates and we could use your help. I’ve run an adapted version of my transit selection pipeline from Q1 data and I’ve applied it to all the classifications from Q2-Q5 that we have complete. We have a large list of potential unknown planet candidates. We need help sorting through identifying those light curves from our top list have actual planet transits similar to what we did for the short period planet analysis. If you’d like to help with the sorting, we could use all the help we can get. Go to http://www.review.planethunters.org now.
Clear Skies,
~Meg