Planet Hunters Talk

Finding planets via script.

  • Edward_R by Edward_R

    I would like to build an application to help find planets. Impossible? Well I dont think so, 😃 If you think outside the box... nothing is impossible.

    We need a API to download these graphs so we can gather and sort this information, automation is the way to go with this, you have a world of programmers at hand, but you dont use them?

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  • Hildifons by Hildifons

    From http://www.planethunters.org/#/science

    Computers vs. Humans: Why do we need your help?
    The Kepler team and other astronomers have developed automated computer algorithms to search the Kepler light curves, for the repeated signal of exoplanet transits. To date over 3000 confirmed planets and planet candidates have been discovered with Kepler, but the Kepler light curves are complex, many exhibiting short-lived changes in brightnesss that are often difficult to characterize. Despite the impressive success of the computers, they may miss transits dominated by the star’s natural variability. The human brain excels at pattern recognition and easily recognizes transits that sophisticated automated routines may miss, and that is where you come in.
    Automated routines have been very successful and many planets and planet candidates have been found, but not all. While we expect computer programs to robustly identify things that they are trained to find, we know there are surprises in the data that the computer algorithms will miss. It is impossible for a single person to review all of the Kepler observations, and experiments have shown that when many people work together, the collective wisdom of the crowds can be better than an expert. With the Internet we can gather the help of hundreds of thousands of people to hunt for exoplanets. The original Planet Hunters proved that this citizen science approach to exoplanets works with over 30 planet candidates and several confirmed planet discoveries.

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  • davidbundy77 by davidbundy77

    I like your enthusiasm, but there are already many algorithms for finding planets from light curves. In fact most of the Kepler exoplanets were first found by computer algorithms and then vetted by astronomers afterwards. The idea of Planet Hunters was to use zooniverse to try to find tricky examples which the algorithms missed.

    If you want to take up the challenge, I suggest you start by downloading the raw data from the MAST archive http://kepler.nasa.gov/science/ForScientists/dataarchive/

    Good luck!

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