Meg Schwamb (ASIAA) - Assessing the Kepler Inventory of Planets with Planet Hunters

With the advent of the Internet, tens of thousands of people across the globe can be enlisted to help astronomers with tasks that are impossible to automate or would be insurmountable for a single person to undertake. In the past decade, this citizen science approach, where independent assessments from multiple non-expert classifiers are combined, has become an established technique in astronomy. As ground-based surveys and spaced-based missions have continued to grow towards the petabyte scale, online citizen science projects have proven quite successful in engaging the general public to mine these rich datasets from studying seasonal processes on Mars to identifying gravitational lenses. Since 2010, Planet Hunters (http://www.planethunters.org) has utilized human pattern recognition to search for exoplanet transits in the light curves from the 160,000 stars monitored by NASA's Kepler mission. The project enlists the general public to identify transits that may be missed by automated detection algorithms looking for periodic events. Visitors to the Planet Hunters' website are presented with a ~30-day light curve segment from one of Kepler’s target stars and are asked to draw boxes to mark the locations of visible transits in the web interface. To date nearly 300,000 people worldwide have participated, contributing in total over 22 million classifications. I will present an overview of the Planet Hunters project and highlight several of the project's key results and most recent exoplanet and astrophysical discoveries, including the confirmation of a transiting circumbinary planet in a quadruple star system.