Good news everyone! Our paper describing the Planet Hunters NGTS project and presenting the first 5 planet candidates discovered by the project has been published in the Astronomical Journal! The p…| Planet Hunters
Last month I had the privilege of observing at the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG) at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma. It’s convenient that often the conditions required for excellent observations are the same as what you’d look for in a warm holiday destination, although when you’re working night shifts there isn’t […]| Planet Hunters
If we’re confident that there is a real transit signal coming from a given star, we can apply for an allocation of time to use the Zorro speckle imager on the Gemini South telescope (which is a hug…| Planet Hunters
Once we have identified an object as a potential planet candidate from the NGTS data, the first step is to check whether we also see the transit signal in data from the Transiting Survey Exoplanet Satellite (TESS). Let’s walk through an example of one of the subjects that we initially thought was a planet candidate, […]| Planet Hunters
You may be wondering how a subject goes from being one of thousands of subjects in the Planet Hunters NGTS project to becoming a candidate and then, hopefully, a bonafide planet! In this series of posts I hope to shed some light on the life cycle of a Planet Hunters NGTS subject. Once a set […]| Planet Hunters
We’ve spotted another transiting object around a star! With unprecedented image resolution we have captured the transit of this festive phenomena seen in the animation below. The transit has a depth of ~6.5% around this small star that has a radius of only 0.4 Solar radii. That means that we can estimate the size of […]| Planet Hunters
This week, I was in Edinburgh for the UK Exoplanet Meeting 2022 (UKExom22, for short) where I presented details of the project and the results so far from Planet Hunters NGTS, including details on our 4 new planet candidates. This was an opportunity to showcase the brilliant work of the Planet Hunters NGTS volunteers to […]| Planet Hunters
You may have seen my previous post announcing that we have 4 new planet candidates discovered by Planet Hunters NGTS, if not you can find it here. We wanted to give you some more information on wha…| Planet Hunters
Today, I presented the latest Planet Hunters NGTS results at the UK’s National Astronomy Meeting in the University of Warwick. Good news everyone! I am very excited to announce that we have four new planet candidates have been found by Planet Hunters NGTS. In addition, we have been able to get some observations of three […]| Planet Hunters
Last week was the Northern Ireland Science Festival, which aims to promote all kinds of science being done across the country and beyond! Since Planet Hunters NGTS is run primarily by researchers at Queen’s University Belfast, we, along with colleagues across the Astrophysics Research Centre, decided we’d get involved by making some videos to excite […]| Planet Hunters