Planet Hunters is a new citizen science project, designed to engage the public in an exoplanet search using NASA Kepler public release data. In the first month after launch, users identified two new planet candidates which survived our checks for false- positives. The follow-up effort included analysis of Keck HIRES spectra of the host stars, analysis of pixel centroid offsets in the Kepler data and adaptive optics imaging at Keck using NIRC2. Spectral synthesis modeling coupled with stellar evolutionary models yields a stellar density distribution, which is used to model the transit orbit. The orbital periods of the planet candidates are 9.8844 \pm0.0087 days (KIC 10905746) and 49.7696 \pm0.00039 (KIC 6185331) days and the modeled planet radii are 2.65 and 8.05 R\oplus. The involvement of citizen scientists as part of Planet Hunters is therefore shown to be a valuable and reliable tool in exoplanet detection.
@article{arxiv.1109.4621,
title = {Planet Hunters: The First Two Planet Candidates Identified by the Public using the Kepler Public Archive Data},
author = {Debra Fischer and Megan Schwamb and Kevin Schawinski and Chris Lintott and John Brewer and Matt Giguere and Stuart Lynn and Michael Parrish and Thibault Sartori and Robert Simpson and Arfon Smith and Julien Spronck and Natalie Batalha and Jason Rowe and Jon Jenkins and Steve Bryson and Andrej Prsa and Peter Tenenbaum and Justin Crepp and Tim Morton and Andrew Howard and Michele Beleu and Zachary Kaplan and Nick vanNispen and Charlie Sharzer and Justin DeFouw and Agnieszka Hajduk and Joe Neal and Adam Nemec and Nadine Schuepbach and Valerij Zimmermann},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1109.4621},
year = {2015}
}