Hi Kurt, it's 80 percent of the candidates. They were looking at about 156,000 stars, not 4,000,000. I think it's important to realize that only a small proportion of any sampling would have planets that happened to be detectable by the star-dimming method because most would not eclipse their stars from our perspective. Thanks, Joe --- On Fri, 2/4/11, Canopus56 <canopus56@yahoo.com> wrote:
From: Canopus56 <canopus56@yahoo.com> Subject: Re: [Utah-astronomy] Rough Notes on Kepler team exoplanet announcement To: "Utah Astronomy List Serv" <utah-astronomy@mailman.xmission.com> Date: Friday, February 4, 2011, 6:45 PM Joe wrote:
the estimate by the science principal investigator that 80 percent of the candidates would pan out
I did only a quick listen to the conference and made some notes because I'm time pressed at the moment. The key point that I left the broadcast fuzzy on is just what were they saying their current best estimate was of the percent of stars that we see along the Milky Way have planets around them. Is it 80 percent of the 1250 heavily fetted candidates out of 4,000,000 in the investigation field, some other number or did they not say. Thanks for the pointers and the good article on your Deseret News blog.
But it looks like there are some good opportunities for Patrick to beat the professionals as confirming at least one candidate and for the general public to directly participate through http://www.planethunters.org in this unique moment in scientific history.
Looking backward in 100 years from now, this will be a key moment in the history books.
- Clear Skies - Kurt
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Supplemental quick notes from the press conference question and answer period notes:
1) Rate of releases and candidates will decrease. This release is the "low-hanging" fruit of low orbital period planets at higher temperatures. As orbital period increases, temperature decreases and the probability of observing a transit is inversely proportional to the orbital period. NASA researchers will tease out some more planets that have longer periods and have faint signals.
2) Candidate planets may contain false signals although aggressive pre-processing of the data has cleaned out most of the false signals. Causes of false signals include - cosmic rays hitting the CCD detector and spectroscopic binary stars.
3) These are all candidate planet systems. No candidates are being held back at this point. Last summer they held a few of the best candidates back for the Kepler team to analyze.
4) The current Feb. 2011 list of 1200 is "much more heavily vetted" as compared to last year's list of 700.
5) Kepler was in safe mode per an announcement a few days ago. The problem is probably a faulty star tracker. The problem has occurred before. Kelper is currently in standby-mode pending resolution of the star tracker issue. The star tracker problem is an ordinary shake-out engineering problem and is not expected to present a significant risk to the mission continuing.
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