Since gravitational waves are now on the tip of every astronomer’s tongue, today’s post looks back at a classic paper’s key result that is quintessential in the search for gravitational waves using pulsar timing arrays.
A new analysis technique, that fits simultaneously for light-curve systematics and transit signals, finds 36 planet candidates in the K2 dataset — Kepler is still in the game!
A common measure of the quality of a fit is the chi-squared statistic. While common, implementation of this statistic assumes uncorrelated noise, which is much less common. Today, we discuss how to deal with noise that is correlated and why it’s important.
Astronomers love data, but how can we visualize multiple dimensions of data simultaneously? What should astronomers do to extract as much information as possible from our hard-earned data?
Planet Hunters is a Citizen Science project, aiming to analyze the slew of data from the Kepler Space Telescope. Planet Hunters look for transit signals in the data, which cause the light from the star to dim periodically.This project is designed to complement the efforts of other scientists to analyze the data using computer algorithms. This paper presents results of the first two planet candidates to be identified using this method, demonstrating that this type of citizen science project is a valuable tool for exoplanet detection.