My Exoplanet Discoveries [Formerly "KIC 7848638 - My First Solar System"]

[Spaceception]

On 12/18/2016 at 0:28 PM, ProtoJeb21 said:

IPH-9b: A possible Hoth analogue, around the same size of Earth with a year of AT LEAST 3 years (>1,100.3 days). The system may also have a distant red dwarf companion.

What kind of star does it orbit?

Edited December 19, 2016 by Spaceception

[ProtoJeb21]

12 minutes ago, Spaceception said:

What kind of star does it orbit?

A somewhat dim orange dwarf with around 68% the mass of our sun. The star has a temperature around 4,300 kelvin.

[Spaceception]

12 minutes ago, ProtoJeb21 said:

A somewhat dim orange dwarf with around 68% the mass of our sun. The star has a temperature around 4,300 kelvin.

So the solar energy it receives is somewhere between the solar energy of Mars and Jupiter?

[kunok]

So, I'm making an assumption, that I will have time to help (dubious really).

I have a telescope, a mak 127/1500, with a goto mount, and I have a "regular" photo camera with a compatible adapter. Can I somewhat help? Probably the telescope is good enough but I don't think about the camera. Astrocameras are pretty expensive...

I would investigate in the holidays if I can use my camera for photometry, I know that I can unfocus the stars so the light is spread in more pixels so I can make better readings. But then my camera has a bayer pattern, photographic integrated UV and IR filters and so...

I don't think I would be able to make regular observations at least until summer, and I'm not even sure of that.

[ProtoJeb21]

1 hour ago, kunok said:

So, I'm making an assumption, that I will have time to help (dubious really).

I have a telescope, a mak 127/1500, with a goto mount, and I have a "regular" photo camera with a compatible adapter. Can I somewhat help? Probably the telescope is good enough but I don't think about the camera. Astrocameras are pretty expensive...

I would investigate in the holidays if I can use my camera for photometry, I know that I can unfocus the stars so the light is spread in more pixels so I can make better readings. But then my camera has a bayer pattern, photographic integrated UV and IR filters and so...

I don't think I would be able to make regular observations at least until summer, and I'm not even sure of that.

1. None of my candidate solar systems have a star brighter than 13th magnitude. You're going to need a pretty big telescope - at least a 20".
2. If you're able to partner up with an observatory or something like that, then the coordinates for every star (excluding IPH-5 and IPH-10) are on SIMBAD.
3. All of these stars are in Cygnus. So...you're going to have to wait until summer. Bummer. (Oh hey, it rhymes!)

[ProtoJeb21]

On 12/19/2016 at 2:54 PM, Spaceception said:

So the solar energy it receives is somewhere between the solar energy of Mars and Jupiter?

I'm not too sure. I will have to do some simulations in US2, but I would think you're mostly right.

[ProtoJeb21]

HUGE UPDATE!

After some...technical difficulties...I have managed to send an E-Mail detailing my discoveries to Debra Fischer. And I have some promising news! She has sent the data over to Joseph Schmitt, and I'm gathering more specific data (the quarters where the transits appeared in) to send to him. It seems like these planets will be confirmed and/or proven false by the very latest the end of the month!

[Oliverm001x]

Impeccable job! This is truly astounding  , who knows you may find a planet orbiting in the habitable goldilocks zone!

[_Augustus_]

11 minutes ago, ProtoJeb21 said:

HUGE UPDATE!

After some...technical difficulties...I have managed to send an E-Mail detailing my discoveries to Debra Fischer. And I have some promising news! She has sent the data over to Joseph Schmitt, and I'm gathering more specific data (the quarters where the transits appeared in) to send to him. It seems like these planets will be confirmed and/or proven false by the very latest the end of the month!

Let me know when you get in the news. Some British kid got in the news for finding ONE planet, and you may have found over a dozen.

6 minutes ago, Oliverm001x said:

Impeccable job! This is truly astounding  , who knows you may find a planet orbiting in the habitable goldilocks zone!

It must be named Kerbin!

[_Augustus_]

Also, ProtoJeb, according to this site Koyash is a rotational variable.

http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/sim-id?Ident=%407961481&Name=KIC 7848638&submit=submit

[ProtoJeb21]

6 minutes ago, _Augustus_ said:

Also, ProtoJeb, according to this site Koyash is a rotational variable.

http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/sim-id?Ident=%407961481&Name=KIC 7848638&submit=submit

That doesn't mean much. Many of Kepler's confirmed planets orbit rotational variables. Koyash has a slow and steady rotational cycle...before becoming so active you can't spot a transit.

[Spaceception]

17 hours ago, ProtoJeb21 said:

HUGE UPDATE!

After some...technical difficulties...I have managed to send an E-Mail detailing my discoveries to Debra Fischer. And I have some promising news! She has sent the data over to Joseph Schmitt, and I'm gathering more specific data (the quarters where the transits appeared in) to send to him. It seems like these planets will be confirmed and/or proven false by the very latest the end of the month!

What did she say? You don't have to tell, I was just wondering what she thought of all the findings.

[maceemiller]

I....urm....thought I'd look into this side of the forum and quickly realised I am WAY outta my depth here! Far to technical for me so I'm just going to creep quietly out of the door and pretend I never ventured in Stunning if you can understand it though!

[ProtoJeb21]

RESEARCH UPDATE 1:

I provided Joseph Schmitt with a list detailing the quarters where each candidate transit of each planet is. However, that wasn't specific enough to pick out the transits... except for one. He was able to find and analyze the dip that could be KIC 7105665.04, the 1.6 Earth radius planet taking hundreds of days to orbit its star. It isn't exactly the right shape of a transit, but it is definitely a promising signal. I later found a second transit of 7105665.04 that I will notify him about soon. Right now, here's what could eventually be my first validated candidate!

He sent this to me as a screenshot, so that's why there's this whole other stuff in the top and bottom. It starts out as the shape of a transit but has this weird thing when it recedes from view. Right now, neither of us know exactly why this is. But as I said before, I managed to find a second transit of the possible planet, and it seems to be a legit transit! I zoomed in on it and saw the light curve go back up after staying down for a short period of time - something like a few hours. Today I'm going to send him a more specific document detailing the days of occurrence for each candidate, as well as listing other promising signals in the data. I lost the sheet of paper listing the days the planets of KIC 7848638 transited, however, so I had to delve back into the data to find them again. Now I have some interesting new results.

It seems like Chantico, Montu, and Sethlans are actually the SAME PLANET. Kupole is unchanged, and Apeliotes is smaller than it used to be. Why? The dip I thought was its second transit and possibly held clues to a potential moon is probably just caused by stellar activity. This means Apeliotes is around the same size as Earth - with NO MOON - orbiting every 884 days instead of 442.

I've got some more stuff to do regarding these systems. Wish me luck!

[Spaceception]

Awesome!

[Andi K.]

Congratulations!

And there are still people who say KSP is a kids' game.

Meanwhile, KSP players are finding exoplanets.

On a slightly unrelated topic, when do you guess that we will be able to take detailed images of exoplanets (detailed meaning the type of image quality from pre-New Horizons Pluto images)?

[_Augustus_]

3 hours ago, AndrewDrawsPrettyPictures said:

On a slightly unrelated topic, when do you guess that we will be able to take detailed images of exoplanets (detailed meaning the type of image quality from pre-New Horizons Pluto images)?

When James Webb launches.

[ProtoJeb21]

REAEARCH UPDATE 2:

Over the past few days I've been analyzing most of my 11 original systems and dozens of new transit possibilities to try and find the closest things to transiting exoplanets that I can get. The end result has provided some good and bad news. Let's get to the bad news first: Most, if not all, of my original candidates are false positives. Bummer. 

HOWEVER...

I have managed to find FIVE NEW candidates using new transit-identifying methods and the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes as a way to double-check. These candidates orbit the stars KIC 6446029, KIC 7418596, KIC 8363450, KIC 6303121, and KIC 6312534. The most promising of the bunch is KIC 8363450.01, which appears to be a ringed mini-Neptune orbiting a red dwarf star every 341.05 days with a rather inclined orbit, causing to transit only about half the time. An image of that candidate's transit is provided below. I have sent the data of these 5 new candidates - and KIC 7105665.04 - over to Joseph Schmitt, and now I just have to wait for the results.

[Andi K.]

Even if most of your original candidates were false positives, that doesn't minimize what you are doing. What you are doing is amazing.

Edited January 15, 2017 by AndrewDrawsPrettyPictures

[Andi K.]

It's honestly a little sad to see all of those planets go like that

I had an emotional attachment with them! This is like my pet fish Bruce dying all over again!

[ProtoJeb21]

1 hour ago, AndrewDrawsPrettyPictures said:

It's honestly a little sad to see all of those planets go like that

I had an emotional attachment with them! This is like my pet fish Bruce dying all over again!

It really does suck that they don't exist...

Hopefully I'll find some more potentially habitable candidates in the future.

[kunok]

Well at least some of them looks promising

[MichaelPoole]

To people saying stuff like "Super-Mars", I seriously doubt a superterrestrial planet orbiting outside the "habitable zone" will be like Mars at all, the whole thing that makes Mars a cold, uninhabitable desert is the low mass and associated volatile and atmospheric loss. A large planet recieving Mars-like heat might even be warmer than Earth, if it has a thick atmosphere, and I think we should shift the whole habitable zone outwards for higher mass terrestrials. Hell, EARTH might have been habitable if it was on a Martian orbit - it might have been covered by ice, but the ice would be a few meters thick, like arctic ice, not Europa ice kilometers thick, easily allowing for sunlight shining through and complex life. Some food for thought http://www.worlddreambank.org/L/LYR.HTM http://www.worlddreambank.org/O/OISIN.HTM . Also, consider 300 million years ago, when the Sun was slightly weaker, the Earth was covered by a carboniferous forest and had more O2 and CO2 in the atmosphere - it might be that planets orbiting around the edge of the traditional habitable zone are actually the most tropical ones, as that allows a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere. Earth's biosphere has been gradually reducing atmospheric CO2 as the Sun is brightening (apart from man, who increases it), and eventually, what will kill all plants of the present type on Earth will not be heat, but CO2 starvation.

[ProtoJeb21]

UPDATE: Joseph was finally able to analyze the data I sent, and he forwarded it to fellow scientist Daryll LaCourse. Here's what happened to the candidates...

• 6446029.01: False positive
• 7418596.01: False positive
• 8363450.01: IDK
• 6303121.01: False positive
• KIC 6312496.01: White dwarf?
• 7105665.04: Still dubious...

Daryll suggested I should inquire Al Schmitt about the program IcTools, which is a VERY good tool for analyzing Kepler and K2 data. So...that's what I'm going to do! While I wait for a reply I'm going candidate hunting.

[Spaceception]

14 hours ago, ProtoJeb21 said:

UPDATE: Joseph was finally able to analyze the data I sent, and he forwarded it to fellow scientist Daryll LaCourse. Here's what happened to the candidates...

• 6446029.01: False positive
• 7418596.01: False positive
• 8363450.01: IDK
• 6303121.01: False positive
• KIC 6312496.01: White dwarf?
• 7105665.04: Still dubious...

Daryll suggested I should inquire Al Schmitt about the program IcTools, which is a VERY good tool for analyzing Kepler and K2 data. So...that's what I'm going to do! While I wait for a reply I'm going candidate hunting.

8363450.01: IDK