Saturday, October 20, 2012

Unlisted UV Ceti Flare Star - KIC 7123391


Forum Talk members have identified a possible unlisted  UV Ceti flare star in the Q7 light curves.

Tom Jacobs:
 
Q7 flares KIC 7123391 This one has a similar outburst in Q8 near D795
No magnitude reading on star. Close in neighbors in sky view but look extremely weak.

Q8 time plot:



Daryll LaCourse:
 
Thanks for flagging this Tom; those look pretty powerful! Star type is listed as Unknown but perhaps it is an M dwarf.

Kian Jek:
Possible, there's hardly any color info on this star but the J-K value of 0.996 suggests a Teff under 4000K. that's about right for a UV Ceti type flare star.


You can follow this star here.





Unlisted RR Lyrae Type C - KIC 2831097


Forum Talk member cappella has identified a possible unlisted RR Lyrae type C star.

Kian Jek:



Could this be an RRc? There is a GO (Kepler Guest Observer program) designation for it, perhaps someone at KASC is already looking at this. But still, Type A subgiant, low metallicity, period 0.2 to 0.5d, amplitude of +/- 10%, slightly sinusoidal profile. For comparison this is the phased plot for KIC 5520878, a known RRc:



Your can follow this star here.

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Behind the Scenes - PH1 at Planet Hunters


http://www.boulder.swri.edu/~terrell/kepler_quadruple_1024.jpg
 Artist's conception of PH1 copyright Dirk Terrell 2012

If you just woke up from a deep sleep, Planet Hunters has recently published a science paper titled
" A Transiting Circumbinary Planet in a Quadruple Star System " named PH1 for Planet Hunters first confirmed planet. A very popular topic. If you search Google and type in key words PH1 and Planet Hunters over 55K hits will show up this week. Not a bad few days work of publicity for this very interesting find. There is something captivating about regular people finding exotic exoplanet systems. Kian Jek and Robert Gagliano are credited for the discovery.

 



  Robert Gagliano 












.

Kepler Science Conference December 2011- Right to Left 
Kian Jek, Dr. Frank Drake, Daryll LaCourse,
Dr. Svetlana Berdyugina

Photograph by Thomas Lee Jacobs

Kian and Robert have made other published finds at Planet Hunters such as a planet candidate orbiting KIC 4552729. The uncovering of PH1 that is orbiting KIC 4862625 all began on the Planet Hunters Science Thread:

Finally - an EB with a planet?

Started by kianjin (Kian Jek)


8 months ago
robert gagliano
Kian, what about the dip in Q2.3 at d106......could that be it? Thanks.


8 months ago
kianjin in response to robert gagliano
You are right - looking at the raw flux, there appear to be 3 matching dips, at BJD 237.79, 374.5 and 511.11. (subtract 131.511 to get the PH timings). The duration appears to be consistent, ~12 hrs.


8 months ago
kianjin
I removed all the EB primary/secondary eclipses, leaving only this third transit.


As can be seen, the periodicity is pretty good. However, the stacked transit curve looks a little lop-sided. It could possibly be due to the fact that transit 2 was interrupted by a primary eclipse. Maybe we need to see one or two more transits to be absolutely sure?

Kian posted again on the Discussion page for the suspected candidate where other members chimed in. That's how it works at Planet Hunters, everyone can voice their views.


kianjin (Kian Jek) 8 months ago
 
First spotted by Robert Gagliano, this could be a circumbinary planet. Three rounded dips are visible.

The EB primary/secondary eclipses were removed, leaving only this third transit:

and obtaining this phased curve:






As can be seen, the periodicity is pretty good. However, the stacked transit curve looks a little lop-sided. It could possibly be due to the fact that transit 2 was interrupted by a primary eclipse. Maybe we need to see one or two more transits to be absolutely sure?
The currently measured transit duration of 13.1hr appears to be too long for a central transit of this primary, but it is possible that the planet, a ~3 RE object, based on the transit depth, is in an eccentric orbit.


8 months ago
ajamyajax
'Well done' from a humble PH'er! I will enjoy reading the scientific paper that hopefully follows. :))
Some general info for others interested:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumbinary_planet



8 months ago
Sika56 
Amazing! Thanks.



6 months ago
arvintan
I think there's another possible transit at 381.6-382.2. Just open the image in a new tab.



6 months ago
ajamyajax in response to arvintan
arvintan:
I think there's another possible transit at 381.6-382.2. Just open the image in a new tab.
Took a look and that appears to be the third transit on Kianjin's chart above. Sorry about that.



6 months ago
arvintan in response to ajamyajax
@ajamyajax
Are you sure? Coz I think the deep one in 379 is the third transit in Kian's chart. If you work you're way back from 379 with the 136.64 day period, you'll get the other two. But if you take the one I proposed, you're not gonna get any good hits.



6 months ago
ajamyajax
Ok I'll look again, maybe I'm wrong. Gotta rush off right now but will chart later. And appreciate your centroid check on the new multi-EB one. Our trying to 'get it right' seems like good science to me. :)



6 months ago
ajamyajax in response to arvintan
arvintan:
@ajamyajax
Are you sure? Coz I think the deep one in 379 is the third transit in Kian's chart. If you work you're way back from 379 with the 136.64 day period, you'll get the other two. But if you take the one I proposed, you're not gonna get any good hits.
Arvintan, now I get it! At least I hope. You mean the area marked with a blue box in the chart below, right? I agree with the similar rounded appearance, this one could be yet another transit. But due to its shallow nature could also be tough to prove without a number of eclipses.. If you see them however, let me know if you need a chart to help establish a period there.

p1
Default_user
6 months ago
arvintan
@ajamyajax
Yes, that's the one. I tried looking for other similar dips but couldn't find one. Should be the case if the planet calc says it's supposed to have a period of somewhere around 872 days for a 2.1 rE planet at 1.725 AU.
And yes, any science with teamwork in it is good science. A pleasure to work with you, sir. :)

Default_user
6 months ago
JKD
likely an EB with p ~20d having a third object around with p ~136.5d


kianjin 2 days ago
 
I wasn't 'allowed' to post these earlier on because we needed to keep radio silence about this, but these plots were made sometime after July, shortly after the last batch of public data was released, to show the TTVs for the planetary object; the 4th and 5th transits in particular were delayed by significant times - up to 2 days.
These TTVs are also evidence that this planet was almost certainly bound to the binary and not a BG EB blend. There are more accurate figures published in the paper, but this was what we had back then:







Planet Hunters Offical Blog:

PH1 : A planet in a four-star system

Planet Hunters’s First Circumbinary Planet- A True Team Effort

The Road to Characterizing PH1: Visual-band Imaging

 

 

 


Sunday, October 14, 2012

Long Period Unlisted Eclipsing Binary - KID 7971363


KID 7971363 is an unlisted eclipsing binary star system flagged by Planet Hunters forum Talk members in Q7.

Kian Jek:
If the primary stellar data is accurate, we're looking at a 0.24x Sol companion, 26x RE, too large to be a brown dwarf. Let's hope we see a primary eclipse soon, but the eclipse duration of ~37.75 hr means a very long period > 10 years!
 You can follow this eclipsing binary here.

Saturday, October 13, 2012

Known Eclipsing Binary also a Heartbeat Binary - KIC 9965691


 KIC 9965691 is a known eclipsing binary star system that is also a Heartbeat binary.

Kian Jek:
 


Heartbeat binary- periodicity already recognized in Prsa v3 as published period is the heartbeat period.
 You can follow this Heartbeat eclipsing binary star system at Planet Hunters here.

Unlisted Planet Candidate KID 2581554


Planet Hunters forum Talk members have identified KID 2581554 as a planet candidate with a very short period.

Kian Jek:
The host is a heavily spotted Type K subgiant with a rapid rotation of ~8 days resulting in a lot of variation which made the 17 transits hard to isolate. There appear to be no correlated APOs. Transits were masked out by hand and the curve detrended:

The light curve is then folded by hand again to obtain a period of 47.148 and a rather good-looking transit curve:


The transit duration is very short because of the high impact parameter of 0.93. The transit depth corresponds to a 7.47x RE planet at a distance of 0.28AU and a Teq of 577K.
 UPDATE: Phased APO plot for Q5 and Q9:


You can follow the discussion for this planet at Planet Hunters here.



Sunday, October 7, 2012

Exomoon Candidate Profile for KID 6867155

File:The Blue Moon.png
 Earth size Exomoon orbiting a Saturn- like planet - Wikipedia

If an exomoon is going to be observed in the Kepler light curves it will have to be larger than any moons seen in our solar system. KID 6867155 is a known Kepler planet candidate that is showing some exomoon characteristics in its second of three observed transits due to transit timing variations observed and cues of a possible exomoon in the second transit drop. We may be seeing the indicators of an actual exomoon orbiting KID 6867155 or evidence of a second unknown planet orbiting the star.

Forum Talk member planetsam:
" Here's KID 6867155, SPH10024957 , a Kepler Favourite. It's listed as a 7.90 Re planet with a period of 235.9742432. We have 3 transits in the data so far. Detrending the SAP and taking the centre of each I get the period of Transit 1-Transit 2 as 235.9656 and Transit 2-Transit 3 as 235.9819. This yields a TTV of approximately 11.7 minutes. The first transit appears slightly distorted based on the floor so I used an additional light detrend of it to compensate, and also treated Transit 2 differently (see below for the reason). Without the improvement of the first transit you still get TTVs of roughly about 10 minutes so it seems real and not just me imagining it though the exact value isn't certain."


" Interesting enough, but some other things caught my eye. For a start, if you look at Transit 2 there is a clear ramp extending beyond the egress. The next thing you notice is that Transit 2's floor is visibly longer in duration (~20 minutes longer than T3's, ~50 minutes longer than T1's, though again that is a little distorted) and flatter than the other transits. I have tried a variety of different ways of cleaning up the transits and using different measures, but I still get the same picture."




" The presence of possible floor duration change coupled with TTVs made me wonder if the impact parameter was changing. If the floor duration change is visible, it might be possible to see the expected correlated total transit duration variation. The problem is this is much more model-fitting dependent than measuring the floor and I think any variation is at or beyond the limit of accuracy. However from the measurements I could get the total duration may show variations of the same order that are out of phase with the floor duration variation. That's not what you would expect from simple planet-planet induced inclination change, but that is however what you'd expect from the effects of an exomoon. Indeed I have a hunch that part of the long duration and flatness of the second transits's floor is because we are actually seeing a relatively large moon transit, re: the egress ramp. Although this cartoon below is exaggerated you can see that a moon that is small compared to the planet (and thus smoother transitions than in this case) transiting with said planet could have the effect of smoothing out and appearing to lengthen the transit floor."



" Which brings me to why I was looking at this system in the first place. I have been reading all the exomoon related papers and came up with some simple parameter values that improved the chances firstly of a system where the planets could realistically harbour large moons (i.e the planets likely have large hill spheres), and cross referenced those with parameters that maximized the ability to detect them both through pure photometry and TTVs. When I applied these constraints to the Kepler Favourites, this was in the list of systems which are most favourable. No doubt I'm barking up the wrong tree again, but I thought I'd share just in case. In any case we will have some SC lightcurves of this star soon which will be interesting."

Forum Talk member Kian Jek:
  
" Well done Sam and this is very interesting indeed! It looks like there might be something here. It is hard to tell because the determination of the transit profiles is tricky with just 3 of them, and an accurate TTV computation requires good approximations of the start and end of transit and the exact mid-point- tl;dr. I've redone the computations you made and I see the presence of TDVs, transit duration variations, which seem significant, and may indicate the presence of a large exomoon, one as large as 1x RE(!) based on the unusual profile of transit 2. But first, here's what I have of the 3 transits fitted with polynomials and the depths, durations and mid-points determined."



" In the image above, the green lines denote the start and end of transits, I used the zero-crossing to make that determination. The differences in the transit durations seem quite large."



" Transit #2 is intriguing because of the apparent 'lip' at the egress that could be the signature of another co-transiting body. The problem with this transit is the missing cadence at the ingress, which could possibly throw any estimates off (this includes the spline interpolation/polynomial fit). What I have done is to simply interpolate the missing value by taking the average of the two on either side, but since this is at the start of the transit, this is unfortunate.

However the transit depths appear to be decreasing, whether this is due to changing inclination (the impact parameter for these transits is very high) or just measurement error is hard to tell, and this could affect the determination of the 'extra' depth in transit #2 due to the putative third body. The radius of the host star has been adjusted down to 0.48x Sol and if that's the case, then the 450ppm dip could be accounted for by an exomoon that is estimated to be around 1.1x RE. This seems a little large for an exomoon but anything is possible. The magnitude of this dip underscores how difficult it is to really discern exomoons that may be much smaller. Finally, from the transit profiles I tried to replicate the O-C plots that Sam made."




" The problem here is that there are 2 ways to determine the minima, using the Kwee-vanWoerden method and a polynomial fit. I used both and they are plotted above. I used the average period as the basis for the C period. The KvW method gives a TTV for the 2nd transit of -6.47 minutes, while the polynomial method gives -7.97 and -7.87 minutes. Unfortunately the error bars for the polynomial fits are just too large. We definitely need to see a few more transits in order to get a better fix on things. But this is a great start and absolutely wonderful if it is true. Goes to show that the human eye may be better than supercomputers in finding exotic phenomena of this sort."

You can follow this discussion here.

 

An Automated Search for Transiting Exocomets- HD 182952 (KIC 8027456)

A team of astronomers led by Grant M. Kennedy , discovered a potential third comet system in the Kepler prime field data of HD 182952 (KIC...