The Visual Survey Group: A Decade of Hunting Exoplanets and Unusual Stellar Events with Space-Based Telescopes

TL;DR

The Visual Survey Group has extensively analyzed space telescope data over a decade, combining professional and amateur efforts to discover exoplanets and rare stellar phenomena, highlighting manual search advantages over automated methods.

Contribution

This paper details the formation, methods, and discoveries of the VSG, emphasizing the effectiveness of manual visual surveys in uncovering overlooked astrophysical objects.

Findings

Surveyed nearly 10 million light curves

Authored 69 peer-reviewed papers

Discovered rare stars and phenomena

Abstract

This article presents the history of the Visual Survey Group (VSG) - a Professional-Amateur (Pro-Am) collaboration within the field of astronomy working on data from several space missions (Kepler, K2 and TESS). This paper covers the formation of the VSG, its survey-methods including the most common tools used and its discoveries made over the past decade. So far, the group has visually surveyed nearly 10 million light curves and authored 69 peer-reviewed papers which mainly focus on exoplanets and discoveries involving multistellar systems found using the transit method. The preferred manual search-method carried out by the VSG has revealed its strength by detecting numerous sub-stellar objects which were overlooked or discarded by automated search programs, uncovering some of the most rare stars in our galaxy, and leading to several serendipitous discoveries of unprecedented astrophysical phenomena. The main purpose of the VSG is to assist in the exploration of our local Universe, and we therefore advocate continued crowd-sourced examination of time-domain data sets, and invite other research teams to reach out in order to establish collaborating projects.