NASA’s Kepler Mission is a search for Earth-sized planets in Earth-like orbits around Sun-like stars. This discovery is not all the mission aims to accomplish, however: one of its most important goals is to measure how frequently planets of different sizes occur around other stars, referred to as the “planetary occurrence rate”. To this end, Kepler has discovered 2712 possible planets (as of March 2013) via a complex combination of automated detection software and human decisions made from visual inspection of the data. Our understanding of the planetary occurrence rate thus hinges on quantifying how these human decisions have impacted Kepler‘s results.
In this project, we will analyze a subset of Kepler‘s latest data by eye, using the guidelines they have defined for identifying the detected signals which could be due to planets. We will then compare these results with the official results announced by the Kepler team, and search for commonalities among the signals which have been classified differently. After a deeper inspection of the data to understand the origin of these differences, we will integrate this understanding into a new estimate of the planetary occurrence rate to report to the wider scientific community.
Mentor: Angie Wolfgang, Graduate Student