To find out new exo-planets by analysing data retrieved by NASA's Kepler Telescope.
We were asked to make shows for our planetarium, and today was their presentation. Our shows were reviewed by club seniors.
We all were divided into groups and we had to present a small planetarium show, based on Stellarium.
We analysed the light curves of the following stars-
->3531558
->5897826
->9450647
->9579641
->11250587
We analysed the light curves and drew conclusions for stars with the foll the following Kepler Id's-
->2444412
->4055765
->7914200
->8505215
->8711294
We analysed Systems with the following Kepler IDs-
->8191672
->9631995
->9941662
->10874614
->11804465
->6922244
->5812701
We have uploaded their reports as docs.
Found a web page showing many methods of analyzing light curves. We are now ready to analyse light curves
We had a Club-Level evaluation of our projects, where we explained our progress and future plans for the project.
We tried to analyse some light curves of stars we got from NASA's STSCI archive.
We read documents related to Kepler Mission and got some insight into the functioning the space telescope.
Downloaded FITS files corresponding to the Kepler ID's of false positive candidates as well as confirmed candidates as observed the difference between their light curves.
Visited www.planethunter.org and to see some sample light curves and analysed them.
We viewed some online tutorials on using DS9 (Search YouTube for NITARP episode 2-DS9) and learned to manipulate
some images taken by large telescopes stored in FITS format.
Summer Project
Astronomy Club
Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur
Kepler Mission
Our progress before First Evaluation
To begin with our project, our first step was to look up for the institution that archives all the data downloaded from NASA Kepler Space Telescope. It is SPACE TELESCOPE SCIENCE INSTITUTE ( www.stsci.edu/portal/ ). The website has a link to its web server that holds all the data, MIKULSKI ARCHIVE for SPACE TELESCOPES https://archive.stsci.edu/kepler/ . On it there is a search and retrieval page which enlists various parameters that help in sorting its database. After altering few parameters we obtained a bunch of file columns, we staged some sample archive files and downloaded it via FTP from the server. The downloaded files were of .FITS format.
We then downloaded some .FITS file analysing softwares like NASA fv (FITS file viewer) and DS9 . Using DS9 we saw that the images were pixelated (i.e. we were having data from only few pixels of a CCD placed in the Kepler Telescope) so since our basic motive was to obtain Light Curves, we treaded further.
We first started analysing sample Light Curves for ourselves from a website www.planethunters.org (This website shows up actual Kepler Light Curves that require manual analysis) to acquaint ourselves with the possible cases for which we can obtain different types of light curves.
In our effort to obtain light curves we went by a site, exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu here we obtained the list of Kepler Object of Interest (This has all those Kepler ID’s that NASA thinks to have potential exo-planets) also it has downloadable light curves for those Kepler ID’s , we can also perform certain operations on then like normalizing the flux . Using it we can also plot phase curves and periodograms.
Alongside we also searched for methods of analysing light curves i.e. how to get orbital period and radius or how to obtain the planet’s radius.
Now with the help of exoplanet archive we can begin our formal analysis of exoplanets.
Screenshot of Kepler ID 11446443
Light curve for Long Cadence PDCSAP Flux ( All Quarters )
Normalised PDCSAP Flux for Long Cadence ( All Quarters )
Zoomed into the previous Normalised Light curve
A much closer look
Focussing on the dip