Have I helped discover a new exo-planet?
I have been visually processing data from "Planet Hunters" for the last month or so and have "discovered" about three or four of what I thought were potential candidate planets orbiting other stars - out of the six hundred plus light curves that I have visually examined so far.
However, none of them stood out as much as this one, "discovered" today. The star is SPH10118148, a dwarf with a radius 1.2 times that of our Sun. It has a magnitude of 13.1 and is spectral type G (similar to the Sun).
The wiggly horizontal line across the top of the graph is the light curve of a variable star, constantly measured by the Kepler satellite over an approximate thirty-two day period. Every two days the light curve drops, first by around 15% as the (presumed) planet passes in front of the star, blocking it's light. The second drop is only about 2% as the (presumed) planet's reflected light is blocked by the star as the (presumed) planet passes behind the star. So, if this candidate is later confirmed as a planet, it will have an orbit around the star of four days and it will probably be a very large one, not Earth-like.
This is cool stuff. If you want to join Planet Hunters and look for new planets around other stars, go to: http://www.planethunters.org and sign up.
Joan says I should have the right to name the planet but it's not like Clyde Tombaugh discovering Pluto or someone discovering a new comet or asteroid. This star's light curve was recorded by an automatic telescope in a sophisticated satellite, downloaded to Earth, processed and sent out for analysis by I don't know how many people around the world, including me. Chances are I wasn't the first. Anyway, there would be a lot of Kepler team members who played bigger parts in the "discovery" than me. Besides, they don't name exo-planets, they allocate the star name, possibly SPH10118148, followed by a letter of the alphabet, such as "a" if it was the first discovered around this particular star or "b" if it was the second.
But I might start my own catalogue and call it Greybeard-1!
EDIT (19th February 2013): I think what I "discovered" was not one of the new planets but an eclipsing binary star, because the 15% light drop is too big for a planet.