DIY Planet Search

 Introduction & Welcome to Do It Yourself Planet Search

Welcome students to the community of planet hunters. Students explore the DIY Planet Search website and share their ideas about the search for extraterrestrial life on other worlds

Modeling A Transit

Using both physical and computer models, students predict the light curve of a star with an orbiting planet and consider how this model might inform their interpretation of their observational data.

Scheduling Telescope Observations

Students take images of stars known to have transiting exoplanets with the MicroObservatory telescope. Image requests should be made during the day before the scheduled Exoplanet target observations (you can go back and acquire data from past observations as well)

Image Analysis: Measuring and Graphing Brightness

Students examine their telescope images, learn how to find their target star, and take measurements of the relative brightness of their star to collaboratively create a light curve.

Data Quality Analysis 

Students inspect their light curve, determine if they think they see evidence for an exoplanet transit, and examine the factors that may affect the quality of their telescope image data.

Data Interpretation

Students analyze the light curve using a “best fit” model to figure out the size of the planet and the nature of its orbit. Along the way they use methods for identifying a signal within noisy data, and consider how to use statistics and a modeling tool to draw conclusions from a light curve with considerable scatter.

Community

This page on the DIY Planet Search website allows teachers (and the public) to post their own work, and to see the work of other schools participating in the project.