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Updated Talk Labels

We have made some updates to the labels that you may encounter on Talk. You may might noticed that sometimes below the light curve on its Talk page, there was black text below  such as ‘Kepler favorite’ or ‘known eclipsing binary’ for example. In these cases, the light curves where from stars where the Kepler team had already identified what they believed to be an exoplanet transiting or an eclipsing star respectively. In preparation for Quarter 16, we have updated and expanded the list of Talk labels.

Updated Talk Labels

The Kepler team’s planet candidate list from Quarter’s 1-12 is now out, and you’ll find those  stars listed as Kepler favorites. Stars that are believed to harbor multiple transiting planets have an additional label, ‘Kepler multiplanet candidate’. The Kepler team has also expanded their list of false positives, where there is a signal the Kepler team spotted in the observations of that star that looks like a transit, but is due to some other astrophysical cause or systematic error. You’ll find those stars labeled as ‘Confirmed Kepler false-positive’. The Kepler eclipsing binary catalog has been updated  as well, and a preliminary version of the new catalog was used to identify already known eclipsing binaries.

New Talk Labels

To help with the volunteer-led efforts on Talk to find new planet candidates, we now identify with labels those light curves that are from stars that the Kepler team’s automated detection algorithm identified potential transit signals or Threshold Crossing Events (TCEs) as they are dubbed by the Kepler team. TCEs are not planet candidates, much more vetting and analysis goes into reviewing the TCEs in order to identify the planet candidates among them. You will see the TCEs from the Q1-Q12 observation  identified by the Kepler team’s automated routines on Talk with the label ‘Kepler Threshold Crossing Event Candidate’.

Planet Hunters volunteers have been spotting new dwarf novae and RR Lyrae variable stars on Talk. To help with this effort, we have now included labels for both categories. You’ll see ‘Known Dwarf Nova’ and ‘Known RR Lyrae Variable Star’ respectively. Thanks to Daryll (nighthawk_black) for assembling the Dwarf novae list and to Abe (cappella) and Robert Szabo for the RR Lyrae list.

Let’s not forget PH1 b and circumbinary planets, where the planet orbits both stars in a stellar binary. The 6 published circumbinary planets are now labeled in Talk as ‘Confirmed Circumbinary Planet’. So let’s go find another!

Happy hunting!

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