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Quick Update

It’s been awhile since we gave an update to what the team’s been up to. So what have we been doing…..

Last month, Chris and I were attending the EPSC–DPS meeting in Nantes, France. I gave a talk on our first results. It went well, and there was good feedback about Planet Hunters.  After the conference, I went to Oxford and spent the week at Oxford Zooniverse HQ with Chris working on all things Planet Hunters.

We’ve developed a pipeline to take the raw classifications and go to short period planet candidates (planets with orbits less than 15 days)  using the results from all your classifications of the real Kepler light curves and the simulations. With the results from the simulations, we know what was detected and not detected and can come out with a detection efficiency for Planet Hunters. It looks like  Planet Hunters is ~90-95% efficient at detecting  objects larger than ~3 Earth radii. We presented the early results from this work at EPSC-DPS, and spent most of the time at Oxford analyzing and understanding the results from the pipeline. It was a good productive trip, and I left Oxford with a plan and outline for a paper based on the results from the short period planet analysis. Chris and I are currently working on writing the first draft of this paper.

Next up, is the First Kepler Science Conference at NASA Ames from December 5-9.  Arfon Smith (lead developer for the Zooniverse, Director of Citizen Science at the Adler Planeterium, and  one of the developers on Planet Hunters)  and I will be attending, and I’ll be giving a talk on Planet Hunters on the second day of the conference. There will also be public talks by some of the Kepler team on the night of December 6th. January 8-12  is the American Astronomical Society’s  (AAS) 219th meeting. This year, the meeting is being held in Austin, Texas, and Chris, Kevin, and I will be there.  Chris will be giving a talk on Planet Hunters at AAS in the Exoplanets: New Surveys Session.

We’re also still looking for new planet candidates and trying to further vet the ones we have identified. We’ll keep everyone posted as more comes from that in the future. More to come as we get closer to those conferences. Now back to paper writing……

Cheers,

~Meg

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