Joseph R. Schmitt

Planet Hunters IX. KIC 8462852 - Where's the flux?

TSB acknowledges support provided through NASA grant ADAP12-0172 and ADAP14-0245. MCW and GMK acknowledge the support of the European Union through ERC grant number 279973. The authors acknowledge support from the Hungarian Research Grants OTKA K-109276, OTKA K-113117, the Lendulet-2009 and Lendulet-2012 Program (LP2012-31) of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the Hungarian National Research, Development and Innovation Office – NKFIH K-115709, and the ESA PECS Contract No. 4000110889/14/NL/NDe. This work was supported by the Momentum grant of the MTA CSFK Lendulet Disc Research Group. GH acknowledges support by the Polish NCN grant 2011/01/B/ST9/05448. Based on observations made with the NOT, operated by the Nordic Optical Telescope Scientific Association at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos, La Palma, Spain, of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias. This research made use of The DASCH project; we are also grateful for partial support from NSF grants AST-0407380, AST-0909073, and AST-1313370. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Communitys Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreements no. 269194 (IRSES/ASK) and no. 312844 (SPACEINN). We thank Scott Dahm, Julie Rivera, and the Keck Observatory staff for their assistance with these observations. This research was supported in part by NSF grant AST-0909222 awarded to M. Liu. The authors wish to recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Mauna Kea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community. We are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain. KS gratefully acknowledges support from Swiss National Science Foundation Grant PP00P2_138979/1. HJD and DN acknowledge support by grant AYA2012-39346-C02-02 of the Spanish Secretary of State for R&D&i (MINECO). This paper makes use of data from the first public release of the WASP data (Butters et al. 2010) as provided by the WASP consortium and services at the NASA Exoplanet Archive, which is operated by the California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under the Exoplanet Exploration Program. This publication makes use of data products from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, which is a joint project of the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology, and NEOWISE, which is a project of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology. WISE and NEOWISE are funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This research made use of the SIMBAD and VIZIER Astronomical Databases, operated at CDS, Strasbourg, France (http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/), and of NASAs Astrophysics Data System.

Planet Hunters. V. A Confirmed Jupiter-size Planet in the Habitable Zone and 42 Planet Candidates from the Kepler Archive Data

We report the latest Planet Hunter results, including PH2 b, a Jupiter-size (R PL = 10.12 ? 0.56 R ?) planet orbiting in the habitable zone of a solar-type star. PH2 b was elevated from candidate status when a series of false-positive tests yielded a 99.9% confidence level that transit events detected around the star KIC?12735740 had a planetary origin. Planet Hunter volunteers have also discovered 42 new planet candidates in the Kepler public archive data, of which 33 have at least 3 transits recorded. Most of these transit candidates have orbital periods longer than 100?days and 20 are potentially located in the habitable zones of their host stars. Nine candidates were detected with only two transit events and the prospective periods are longer than 400?days. The photometric models suggest that these objects have radii that range between those of Neptune and Jupiter. These detections nearly double the number of gas-giant planet candidates orbiting at habitable-zone distances. We conducted spectroscopic observations for nine of the brighter targets to improve the stellar parameters and we obtained adaptive optics imaging for four of the stars to search for blended background or foreground stars that could confuse our photometric modeling. We present an iterative analysis method to derive the stellar and planet properties and uncertainties by combining the available spectroscopic parameters, stellar evolution models, and transiting light curve parameters, weighted by the measurement errors. Planet Hunters is a citizen science project that crowd sources the assessment of NASA Kepler light curves. The discovery of these 43 planet candidates demonstrates the success of citizen scientists at identifying planet candidates, even in longer period orbits with only two or three transit events.

Planet Hunters. VII. Discovery of a New Low-mass, Low-density Planet (PH3 C) Orbiting Kepler-289 with Mass Measurements of Two Additional Planets (PH3 B and D)

We report the discovery of one newly confirmed planet (P = 66.06 days, R_P = 2.68 ± 0.17 R_⊕) and mass determinations of two previously validated Kepler planets, Kepler-289 b (P = 34.55 days, R_P = 2.15 ± 0.10 R_⊕) and Kepler-289-c (P = 125.85 days, R_P = 11.59 ± 0.10 R_⊕), through their transit timing variations (TTVs). We also exclude the possibility that these three planets reside in a 1:2:4 Laplace resonance. The outer planet has very deep (~1.3%), high signal-to-noise transits, which puts extremely tight constraints on its host stars stellar properties via Keplers Third Law. The star PH3 is a young (~1 Gyr as determined by isochrones and gyrochronology), Sun-like star with M_* = 1.08 ± 0.02 M_☉, R_* = 1.00 ± 0.02 R_☉, and T_(eff) = 5990 ± 38 K. The middle planets large TTV amplitude (~5 hr) resulted either in non-detections or inaccurate detections in previous searches. A strong chopping signal, a shorter period sinusoid in the TTVs, allows us to break the mass-eccentricity degeneracy and uniquely determine the masses of the inner, middle, and outer planets to be M = 7.3 ± 6.8 M_⊕, 4.0 ± 0.9 M_⊕, and M = 132 ± 17 M_⊕, which we designate PH3 b, c, and d, respectively. Furthermore, the middle planet, PH3 c, has a relatively low density, ρ = 1.2 ± 0.3 g cm^(–3) for a planet of its mass, requiring a substantial H/He atmosphere of 2.1^(+0.8)_(-0.3)% by mass, and joins a growing population of low-mass, low-density planets.

Planet hunters. VI. An independent characterization of KOI-351 and several long period planet candidates from the Kepler archival data

We report the discovery of 14 new transiting planet candidates in the Kepler field from the Planet Hunters citizen science program. None of these candidates overlapped with Kepler Objects of Interest (KOIs) at the time of submission. We report the discovery of one more addition to the six planet candidate system around KOI-351, making it the only seven planet candidate system from Kepler. Additionally, KOI-351 bears some resemblance to our own solar system, with the inner five planets ranging from Earth to mini-Neptune radii and the outer planets being gas giants; however, this system is very compact, with all seven planet candidates orbiting

Kepler eclipsing binary stars – VI. Identification of eclipsing binaries in the K2 Campaign 0 data set

\lesssim 1

Modeling the Asteroseismic Surface Term across the HR Diagram

AU from their host star. A Hill stability test and an orbital integration of the system shows that the system is stable. Furthermore, we significantly add to the population of long period transiting planets; periods range from 124-904 days, eight of them more than one Earth year long. Seven of these 14 candidates reside in their host stars habitable zone.