An Update on the Student Exoplanet Programme

TL;DR

This paper updates on an international exoplanet research collaboration, highlighting recent achievements in density estimation and comparing optimization techniques, notably WinFitter and MCMC, for exoplanet data analysis.

Contribution

It provides new density estimates for specific exoplanets and evaluates the performance of the WinFitter optimizer against established MCMC methods.

Findings

WinFitter's error estimates align with MCMC results after scaling.

Updated density measurements for HD 209458 and Kepler 1.

Expanded international collaboration includes a US community college.

Abstract

An update is given on the exoplanet research collaboration between Nielsen (a marketing research company), Brigham Young University, and NZ universities with the National University of Singapore, which has been expanded to include a community college in the US. Key achievements from the past year are outlined, including density estimates for HD 209458 and Kepler 1 from radial velocity and transit fits. A comparison between the WinFitter optimizer and other techniques is outlined, showing that WinFitter estimated statistical errors are essentially in line (bar a scaling proportion) with those estimated via Markov Chain Monte Carlo techniques.