Planet Hunters: The First Two Planet Candidates Identified by the Public using the Kepler Public Archive Data

TL;DR

Planet Hunters is a citizen science project that successfully engaged the public in identifying two new exoplanet candidates from Kepler data, demonstrating the effectiveness of public participation in scientific discovery.

Contribution

This study introduces a citizen science approach to exoplanet detection, resulting in the first two planet candidates identified by public volunteers using Kepler data.

Findings

Two new planet candidates with radii of 2.65 and 8.05 Earth radii.

Public involvement is a reliable tool for exoplanet detection.

Follow-up analyses confirmed the planetary nature of the candidates.

Abstract

Planet Hunters is a new citizen science project, designed to engage the public in an exoplanet search using NASA Kepler public release data. In the first month after launch, users identified two new planet candidates which survived our checks for false- positives. The follow-up effort included analysis of Keck HIRES spectra of the host stars, analysis of pixel centroid offsets in the Kepler data and adaptive optics imaging at Keck using NIRC2. Spectral synthesis modeling coupled with stellar evolutionary models yields a stellar density distribution, which is used to model the transit orbit. The orbital periods of the planet candidates are 9.8844 \pm0.0087 days (KIC 10905746) and 49.7696 \pm0.00039 (KIC 6185331) days and the modeled planet radii are 2.65 and 8.05 R\oplus. The involvement of citizen scientists as part of Planet Hunters is therefore shown to be a valuable and reliable tool in exoplanet detection.