Info 202 Fall 2011

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/74449/title/Stellar_oddballs

The Kepler telescope, launched a little
over two years ago, has quietly been orbiting about the sun in
Earth's trail capturing the dimming and brightening of nearly 160,000
stars. Every 30 minutes for 24 hours a day Kepler takes a snapshot,
gathering the photometry of individual stars in the same patch of sky
between Cygnus and Lyra. This incredible wealth of data has already
yielded more than 1200 identifiable extrasolar planets for the
Kepler team as well as a growing list of unknown phenomenon. This
overwhelming volume of photometry is easily run through simple
programs searching for predictable dips in plots, called light curves
indicative of planets crossing the path of a given star. Harder
however is finding a quantifiable way to discover patterns that can't
be explained.

Geoff Marcy, an astronomy professor at
the University of California Berkeley has attempted to overcome this
by approaching the plots with the discerning capabilities of the
human eye. Hiring an undergraduate student at Cal to go through the
thousands of plots one by one, already several spectacular
discoveries have been made by his team. Calling these unexplained
light curves 'WTF objects' Marcy hopes they will yield exciting new
theories and revelations about the uncharted frontier of space. With
much of the Kepler data now public these bizarre stars can be
studied by anyone willing to sift through the sea of collected photometry looking for the next big astronomical discovery. As data pours in for the
next two years until the Kepler mission is retired the astronomy
community will continue to scour, looking for more spectacular anomalies and
finding ways to explain them.