Today while doing Project Discovery I came came across sample 200291933. At fist this sample seemed like random, transit-less junk, but on closer observation and with repeated use of the “divide” tool there seemed to be hints of a low-orbital period transit. Extensive searching finally elucidated it—once I found it, it was plain as day, so plain you could mistake it for one of the easy tutorial transits (I wish I had kept a folded-mode screenshot, the dips really aligned super well). However the orbital period was tiny. It was so tiny that I had to mark it as five separate repeating transits, each with an orbital period of approximately 0.29 (see non-folded mode screenshot below).
But because this transit was almost impossible to find due to the low orbital period it seems that basically nobody else found it (only 1/4 of players marked anything at all).
It would be a shame if a planet remained undiscovered because of this. Is there maybe some change to the Project Discovery UI that would make this kind of transit easier to find?
I once found a sample that had 4 or 5 transits, that I was super confident on. Like, I fully expected it to be one of the accuracy test samples. Anyway, the planet did take a little bit of effort to find, and it looks like many players didn’t put in that effort. Because there was only like a 5.4% consensus on the sample. This made me wonder how the astronomers treat our results. Like, will the astronomers even look at a sample with a 5% consensus? Or will they spend their time on “more promising” ones?
I probably should have saved a screenshot and tried making my case for a planet to the appropriate people. Maybe I could have gotten naming rights. And then there would be a planet named “Planet McPanetface” or “Urasshole” or something.
@Xeux
Yeah, there’s a limit to how small you can make your orbital periods, and he’s saying that he found a planet that orbited even faster than that. I don’t know if sunspots or anything else can account for what he found, but I’m certainly happy to see that some players are putting in the effort, and not just trying to min max it for the rewards.
I would like to raise the question that what you’ve found is not an orbital transit but rather a product of the star itself. Another clue as to why I don’t think you’ve found a transit is because your supposed transit is only ~8 hours for a full circle around the star, now I’m sure that astronomers have calculated a minimum distance an orbital body have to be away from it’s star for it to be possible (and not be pull into the star by it’s gravitational forces), in comparison; our own Mercury, the planet closest to our star in our solar system, has a orbital transit of almost 88 days.
I think I get something at level 50. Lame bonuses, though. At my -8 sec status the Pacifier doesn’t seem that great. Maybe I can shove it into my battleship escape bay. Or sell it and buy hundreds of catalysts.
Yes, I myself suspect that this may not have been caused by a planet. But in that case, and if this sort of thing is common, shouldn’t it be de-trended out of the data before we see it? The alignment was nearly perfect, so a computer should be able to detect the patten easily, and in addition removing this kind of pattern from the data automatically would make it easier for us to find the real transits.
No, as you know the test samples are samples that scientists have already checked and confirmed; all the other samples are data which are yet to be determined if there is a presidency for orbital bodies. This is what this (PD) Citizen Science is all about; to help scientists decide which, of course not only left to us, sample may be worth taking a closer look at and/or study closer with telescopes.
