Planet Hunters NGTS: New Planet Candidates from a Citizen Science Search of the Next Generation Transit Survey Public Data
We present the results from the first two years of the Planet Hunters Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) citizen science project, which searches for transiting planet candidates in data from the NGTS by enlisting the help of members of the general public. Over 8000 registered volunteers reviewed 138,198 light curves from the NGTS Public Data Releases 1 and 2. We utilize a user weighting scheme to combine the classifications of multiple users to identify the most promising planet candidates not initially discovered by the NGTS team. We highlight the five most interesting planet candidates detected through this search, which are all candidate short-period giant planets. This includes the TIC-165227846 system that, if confirmed, would be the lowest-mass star to host a close-in giant planet. We assess the detection efficiency of the project by determining the number of confirmed planets from the NASA Exoplanet Archive and TESS Objects of Interest (TOIs) successfully recovered by this search and find that 74% of confirmed planets and 63% of TOIs detected by NGTS are recovered by the Planet Hunters NGTS project. The identification of new planet candidates shows that the citizen science approach can provide a complementary method to the detection of exoplanets with ground-based surveys such as NGTS.
History
Author affiliation
College of Science & Engineering Physics & AstronomyVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Published in
The Astronomical JournalVolume
167Issue
5Pagination
238 - 238Publisher
American Astronomical Societyissn
0004-6256eissn
1538-3881Copyright date
2024Available date
2024-05-14Publisher DOI
Language
enPublisher version
Deposited by
Dr Matthew BurleighDeposit date
2024-05-13Rights Retention Statement
- No