Related papers: Crowdfunding Astronomy Research with Google Sky

Over two hundred years ago Capt. James Cook sailed up Whitsunday Passage, just a few miles where we now sit, on a voyage of astronomical observation and discovery that remains an inspiration to us all. Since the prospects of our visiting…

Of the more than 150000 targets followed by the Kepler Mission, about 10% were selected as red giants. Due to their high scientific value, in particular for Galaxy population studies and stellar structure and evolution, their Kepler light…

The Pulsar Search Collaboratory (PSC) engages high school students and teachers in analyzing real data from the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope for the purpose of discovering exotic stars called pulsars. These cosmic clocks can be used…

We have monitored 20 Sun-like stars in the Kepler field-of-view for excess flux with the FIES spectrograph on the Nordic Optical Telescope since the launch of Kepler spacecraft in 2009. These 20 stars were selected based on their…

The LAMOST-Kepler (LK-) project was initiated to use the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) to make spectroscopic follow-up observations for the targets in the field of the Kepler mission. The Kepler field is…

We propose to use Kepler in 2-wheel mode to conduct a detailed search for Earth-sized planets orbiting ultra-cool stars and brown dwarfs (spectral types from M7 to L3). This population of objects presents several advantages for exoplanet…

We present the first data release of the Kepler Smear Campaign, using collateral 'smear' data obtained in the Kepler four-year mission to reconstruct light curves of 102 stars too bright to have been otherwise targeted. We describe the…

During the last few years, considerable effort has been directed towards large-scale (>> $1 Billion US) missions to detect and characterize earth-like planets around nearby stars, such as the Terrestrial Planet Finder Interferometer (TPF-I)…

The Pandora SmallSat is a NASA flight project aimed at studying the atmospheres of exoplanets -- planets orbiting stars outside our Solar System. Pandora will provide the first dataset of simultaneous, multiband (visible and NIR),…

The Pulsar Search Collaboratory [PSC, NSF #0737641] is a joint project between the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and West Virginia University (WVU) designed to interest high school students in science, technology, engineering,…

Measuring scientific development is a difficult task. Different metrics have been put forward to evaluate scientific development; in this paper we explore a metric that uses the number of peer-reviewed, and when available non-peer-reviewed…

The Kepler Mission was launched on March 6, 2009 to perform a photometric survey of more than 100,000 dwarf stars to search for Earth-size planets with the transit technique. The reliability of the resulting planetary candidate list relies…

Public engagement (PE) initiatives can lead to a long term public support of science. However most of the real impact of PE initiatives within the context of long-term science policy is not completely understood. An examination of the…

NASA's Kepler Mission promises to detect transiting Earth-sized planets in the habitable zones of solar-like stars. In addition, it will be poised to detect the reflected light component from close-in extrasolar giant planets (CEGPs)…

Microlensing has recently proven to be a valuable tool to search for extrasolar planets of Neptune- to super-Earth-mass planets at orbits of few AU. Since planetary signals are of very short duration, an intense and continuous monitoring is…

Discovering other worlds the size of our own has been a long-held dream of astronomers. The transiting planets Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f, which belong to a multi-planet system, hold a very special place among the many groundbreaking…

The successful launches of the CoRoT and Kepler space missions have led to the detections of solar-like oscillations in large samples of red-giant stars. The large numbers of red giants with observed oscillations make it possible to…

Photometry of stars from the K2 extension of NASA's Kepler mission is afflicted by systematic effects caused by small (few-pixel) drifts in the telescope pointing and other spacecraft issues. We present a method for searching K2 light…

The vast majority of known extrasolar planets orbit stars with a narrow range of masses (0.7-1.3 M_sun). Recent years have seen rapid growth in our knowledge about the properties of planetary systems with host stars significantly more…

The ~ 200,000 stars observed by the Kepler mission have provided unprecedented constraints across astrophysics. With the advent of modern spectroscopic and photometric surveys, new limits in stellar characterizations are within reach. In…