Planet Patrol: A NASA Citizen Science Program to Discover New Exoplanets
Abstract: You may have heard about the recent discovery of a new planet orbiting a pair of “eclipsing binary” stars led by summer intern Wolf Cukier and his mentor, Veselin Kostov, using data from NASA’s TESS mission. Eclipsing binaries are pairs of stars whose orbits are lined up in a handy way so the stars pass in front of one another now and then with one star blocking the light from the other. If there’s a planet orbiting the eclipsing binary, it’s likely to orbit in the same plane as the stars, and block out the light from one or more of the stars as it passes by. Dr. Kostov will explain how you can join the Planet Patrol Project and help discover a new exoplanet yourself.
Speaker: Dr. Veselin Kostov is the Planet Patrol project leader at Nasa. Dr. Kostov is a research scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and SETI Institute. His research focus is on detection, vetting and characterization of transiting exoplanets from Kepler, K2, and TESS, with the goal of understanding how these form, evolve, and compare to the Solar System.