Planet Hunters Talk

Hello from Debra Fischer!

  • dfischer123 by dfischer123 scientist

    Dear Planet Hunters! I'm a professor at Yale and with my postdocs and students we are working to follow up on the great discoveries that you make! Our biggest worry is that people will think that the "sims" are a waste of time - every one of those classifications is doing the hard job of calculating the corrections factors we need to make to determine the true number of transiting planets.
    We hope that you all have a great time with the new website - thanks to the Zooniverse team at Adler for their hard work in making this happen!

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  • SteveKennett by SteveKennett

    Hi I am also a professional physicist with may years of experience. The requirement for simulated transits is simply to determine the detection efficiency of Planet Hunters users in detecting a range of transits shapes. The correction factors are necessary to estimate the total number of real transits missed in a large collection of stars. The difficulty here is that as the signal to noise ratio decreases, the detection efficiency drops to a point where a transit can't be detected. Of course with a noisy signal the rate of 'detection' of false transits also increases. There is a point where simulated transits are not useful to the user and the method of presenting large numbers of users with "look you missed this transit" is not productive. Clearly detectible example simulations in a modest number of cases is good practice in training users. However the introduction of simulated transits well below the noise level is not. If the students require information near the threshold level I am sure that this can be achieved without the need to highlight their inclusion.

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  • mschwamb by mschwamb scientist in response to SteveKennett's comment.

    Hi,

    We don't know where that noise floor is given the variability of the Kepler data. So we need to put in a range of simulations to be able to specifically measure that. We have an idea from the old interface but things have changed with the new interface so we do need to find where that limit is observationally with the new Planet Hunters classifications.

    We did remove 1.0 Earth radii and smaller simulations I believe because they were not able to be spotted by the science team during our beta testing and debugging before launch. Also again we have to balance the needs of the project from different sets of users. The majority of classifiers do a few classifications and leave there are others like yourself who do more and we need to balance the ratio of showing simulated transits to accommodate both groups.

    If many people on Talk feel the simulations are showing at too high a rate, we can likely decrease the showing rate a bit further, if the the science team agrees but let's give it at least the weekend where we have it.

    If you'd like to discuss the simulations more, let's continue the discussion here.

    Cheers,

    ~Meg

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