please note that my website has moved to
www.noraeisner.com
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planet hunters tess
Planet Hunters TESS (PHT) is a citizen science project hosted by the Zooniverse platform. The project makes use of NASA's TESS satellite which monitors 20,000 bright nearby stars every month, recording their brightness every two minutes. Wit the help of citizen scientists, we can find new planet candidates that the automated algorithms missed.
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To date, PHT has discovered 150 planet candidates that were otherwise missed, and more are found on a monthly basis with the release of more TESS data.
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To find out more or to have a go, gead to planethunters.org to have a go!
Some of our results
two-planet system
Multi-planet systems, like this one found via Planet Hunters TESS, are very exciting as they offer a wealth of information. In particular, they allow for comparative planetology: the study of two planets that necessarily formed at the same time and out of the same material, but which have evolved in different ways over time resulting in different planet properties that we observe today. Studying these two planets together, therefore allows us to test theories of planet formation and evolution.
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TOI 813 b is the first validated PHT Planet! It's around 7 times larger than the Earth, on an 84 days orbit around a 3.7 billion year old star. Studying planets around old stars - especially when they have longer periods like this one - gives us insight into what happens to planet in the later stages of their lives.
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Eisner et al. MNRAS, 494, 1 (2020)
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older planet
multi-stellar system
Thirty thousand pairs of eyes visually looking at data collected by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite leads to many exciting discoveries - including asteroids, supernova, eclipsing binaries and multi-stellar systems – all of which have nothing to do with planets at all but are equally exciting! Our latest discovery is made up of three very massive stars that put our understanding of how massive stars form to the test.
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Eisner et al. MNRAS, 511, 4 (2022)
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