Planet Hunters: Assessing the Kepler Inventory of Short Period Planets

Abstract

We present the results from a search of data from the first 33.5 days of the Kepler science mission (Quarter 1) for exoplanet transits by the Planet Hunters citizen science project. Planet Hunters enlists members of the general public to visually identify transits in the publicly released Kepler light curves via the World Wide Web. Over 24,000 volunteers reviewed the Kepler Quarter 1 data set. We examine the abundance of \geq 2 R\oplus planets on short period (< 15 days) orbits based on Planet Hunters detections. We present these results along with an analysis of the detection efficiency of human classifiers to identify planetary transits including a comparison to the Kepler inventory of planet candidates. Although performance drops rapidly for smaller radii, \geq 4 R\oplus Planet Hunters \geq 85% efficient at identifying transit signals for planets with periods less than 15 days for the Kepler sample of target stars. Our high efficiency rate for simulated transits along with recovery of the majority of Kepler \geq 4 R\oplus planets suggest suggests the Kepler inventory of \geq 4 R\oplus short period planets is nearly complete.

41 pages,13 figures, 8 tables, accepted to ApJ

References in corpus (4)

• Galaxy Zoo 1 : Data Release of Morphological Classifications for nearly 900,000 galaxies
• The Transiting Circumbinary Planets Kepler-34 and Kepler-35
• TrES-2: The First Transiting Planet in the Kepler Field
• Galaxy Zoo: The large-scale spin statistics of spiral galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

Cited by in corpus (33)

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• The First Brown Dwarf Discovered by the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 Citizen Science Project
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• 150 New transiting planet candidates from Kepler Q1-Q6 data
• Planet Hunters. VIII. Characterization of 41 Long-Period Exoplanet Candidates from Kepler Archival Data
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• Planet Hunters. VI: An Independent Characterization of KOI-351 and Several Long Period Planet Candidates from the Kepler Archival Data
• Planet Hunters. V. A Confirmed Jupiter-Size Planet in the Habitable Zone and 42 Planet Candidates from the Kepler Archive Data
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• Active red giants: close binaries versus single rapid rotators
• Planet Hunters TESS II: Findings from the first two years of TESS
• Planet Four: Terrains - Discovery of Araneiforms Outside of the South Polar Layered Deposits
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• Planet Four: Probing Springtime Winds on Mars by Mapping the Southern Polar CO${}_2$ Jet Deposits
• K2-288Bb: A Small Temperate Planet in a Low-mass Binary System Discovered by Citizen Scientists
• The Moon Zoo citizen science project: Preliminary results for the Apollo 17 landing site
• Precovery of near-Earth asteroids by a citizen-science project of the Spanish Virtual Observatory
• NASA's Asteroid Grand Challenge: Strategy, Results and Lessons Learned
• Efficient Follow-Up of Exoplanet Transits Using Small Telescopes
• Planet Hunters NGTS: New Planet Candidates from a Citizen Science Search of the Next Generation Transit Survey Public Data
• The SATCHEL pipeline: A general tool for data classified through citizen science