Additional Kepler Data Now Available to All Planet Hunters
From the post:
The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., is releasing 12 additional months worth of planet-searching data meticulously collected by one of the most prolific planet-hunting endeavors ever conceived, NASA’s Kepler Mission.
As of Oct. 28, 2012, every observation from the extrasolar planet survey made by Kepler since its launch in 2009 through June 27, 2012, is available to scientists and the public. This treasure-trove contains more than 16 terabytes of data and is housed at the Barbara A. Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes, or MAST, at the Space Telescope Science Institute. MAST is a huge data archive containing astronomical observations from 16 NASA space astronomy missions, including the Hubble Space Telescope. It is named in honor of Maryland U.S. Senator Barbara A. Mikulski.
Over the past three years the Kepler science team has discovered 77 confirmed planets and 2,321 planet candidates. All of Kepler’s upcoming observations will be no longer exclusive to the Kepler science team, its guest observers, and its asteroseismology consortium members and will be available immediately to the public.
…..
In addition to yielding evidence for planets circling some of the target stars, the Kepler data also reveal information about the behavior of many of the other stars being monitored. Kepler astronomers have discovered star spots, flaring stars, double-star systems, and “heartbeat” stars, a class of eccentric binary systems undergoing dynamic tidal distortions and tidally induced pulsations.
There is far more data in the Kepler archives than astronomers have time to analyze quickly. Avid volunteer astronomers are invited to make Kepler discoveries by perusing the archive through a website called “Planet Hunters,” (http://www.planethunters.org/). A tutorial informs citizen scientists how to analyze the Kepler data, so they may assist with the research. Visitors to the website cannot actually see individual planets. Instead, they look for the effects of planets as they sweep across the face of their parent stars. Volunteer scientists have analyzed over 14 million observations so far. Just last week citizen scientists announced the discovery of the first planet to be found in a quadruple-star system.
The additional analysis by volunteer scientists, especially: “the first planet to be found in a quadruple-star system,” illustrates the power of sharing “big data.”
[…] I mentioned last year, Kepler Telescope Data Release: The Power of Sharing Data, a group of amateurs discovered the first system with four (4) suns and at least one (1) […]
Pingback by Kepler Data Tutorial : What can you do? « Another Word For It — March 2, 2013 @ 4:55 pm