Citizen Scientists Discover Planet in Quadruple Star System - PC Magazine [fornadablog.blogspot.com]
[fornadablog.blogspot.com], Citizen Scientists Discover Planet in Quadruple Star System - PC Magazine
The Planet Hunters citizen science website proved its mettle in a big way yesterday with the announcement of its first confirmed planet discovery, which also happens to be the first planet to be found in a quadruple star system.
Like Kepler 16-B (aka “Tatooineâ€), the new worldâ€"dubbed Planet Hunters 1 or PH1â€"orbits a close binary star; a second pair of stars much farther away is also gravitationally bound to the system. The Planet Hunters team has submitted a paper detailing the find to the Astrophysical Journal, with citizen scientist volunteers Kian Jek and Robert Gagliano listed as co-authors.
The star system in which PH1 resides, known by the prosaic Kepler catalogue designation KIC 4862625, is about 5,000 light-years from Earth. PH1 is about six times the radius of the Earth, a little larger than Neptune and probably a gas giant planet. It circles the pair of starsâ€"which orbit each other every 20 daysâ€"in about 137 days. The other two stars in the system lie 90 billion miles away from PH1, about 1,000 times the Earth-Sun distance.
Citizen Astronomers
The Planet Hunters website, which was launched in December 2010, lets the public search for exoplanetsâ€"planets orbiting other starsâ€"in data from NASA’s Kepler planet-search project, which images a star field containing some 160,000 stars, measuring each star’s brightness every half hour. The volunteers look at light curvesâ€"graphs showing fluctuations in a star’s brightness over a period of roughly a monthâ€"looking for transits, brief dips in a star’s brightness that could indicate the passage of an unseen object, possibly a planet, in front of the star. Public response to this project has been overwhelming; more than 170,000 people have registered at the site.
Although the Kepler project’s search algorithms have identified large numbers of planetary candidatesâ€"more than 2,000 to dateâ€"the human eye may be better in picking up certain types of transits, such as in some variable stars whose fluctuations may mask the relatively small brightness dips of a planetary transit. The volunteer hunters have identified dozens of possible planets, of which four promising candidates have been written up in papers, now published, by the Planet Hunters team. PH1, though, is the first Planet Hunters candidate to meet the strict criteria needed for a planet to be considered confirmed. The paper still has to undergo peer review before it is published by the Astronomical Journal.
In May 2011, Kian reported an anomalous dip in brightness in the light curve of an eclipsing binary star systemâ€"two stars that orbit each other in our line of sight and pass in front of each other in turnâ€" and noted it on a thread in the Planet Hunters Talk forum. It turns out he had independently found the world that was announced by the Kepler team four months later as Kepler 16-B.
The Discovery of PH1
Planet Hunters site coordinator Meg Schwamb then posted a list of the ~1,500 eclipsing binaries known in the Kepler data, inviting the site’s volunteers to peruse the data. Gagliano systematically searched through the stars’ light curves, and in February 2012 noted two possible transits in the data from one binary star separated by 137 days, one of which had previously been reported by a planet hunter named JKD. Kian then predicted and found a third transit. Planet Hunters enlisted a team of 10 professionals to gather further data, analyze the results, and rule out any alternate explanations for the dips in brightness. It was during this additional imaging that the presence of the second pair of stars was revealed.
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