Citizen Scientist Participation in Transiting Exoplanet Science

Since the discovery of the first transiting Exoplanet in 1999, shortly after the initial discovery by the radial velocity method,  over 3189 such systems have been discovered.  As a result in recent years the field has started to transition from a discovery phase to one of characterisation and understanding more about the planets discovered.  Ground based surveys with very small telescopes have been extremely successful discovery machines but the majority of known transiting exoplanets were discovered by the space borne Kepler and K2 missions, a legacy that is continuing with the NASA TESS mission.  Consequently the field of transiting exoplanet science is now a target rich environment, which combined with the relative scarcity and competition for professional telescope time, provides an ideal opportunity for participation by citizen scientists.  In this context a citizen scientist is a person or group with access to, and the knowledge to use, the equipment required to make precise photometric observations, whether this is their own telescope or through the use of shared , educational or commercial facilities.

Exoplanet science is a field that excites and captures the imagination of both the general public, amateur astronomers and students alike.  Arguably the most successful project supporting citizen scientist participation has been the Exoplanet Transit Database (ETD) run by the Czech Astronomical Society since 2009 the database has accumulated over 10,000 lightcurves of 350+ exoplanet systems, contributed mostly by an army of nearly 1200 globally distributed amateur observers.  Although originally created as a way to search for transit timing variations, the wealth of data gathered has been used by professional astronomers including searches for orbital period decay or apsidal precession in transiting hot Jupiters.  The network of observers has also resulted in a number of pro-am collaborations producing exciting results such as the discovery of TrEs-5c.

One of the key missions planned for this decade to help characterise transiting exoplanet atmospheres is the ESA medium class mission ARIEL (Atmospheric Remote-sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey satellite), scheduled for launch sometime in 2028.  This ambitious transit spectroscopy mission aims to measure the spectra of over 1000 transiting exoplanet atmospheres to better understand their chemical composition, their formation and evolutionary histories and the links between the planets and their stellar environment.  To help achieve this, precise knowledge of all 1000+ planet ephemerides is required to optimise the science return from the 4-year mission.  The Exoclock project is an initiative run by the ARIEL Ephemerides Working Group to focus and coordinate both professional and citizen scientist observations of exoplanet transit light curves to measure transit mid-times and to monitor the stellar variability of the host stars for all the systems on the ARIEL target list.  To this end the Exoclock team have created a suite of tools, guides and educational material to help widen participation, target those systems most in need of observations and provide homogenous results to allow accurate scheduling of ARIEL observations.  ARIEL is by no means the only space science mission eliciting support from the citizen scientist and amateur astronomy community with projects also being run for the follow up of TESS observations and the PLATO amateur collaboration project.

In this presentation I will review the growing need for citizen scientists to support flagship exoplanet science missions and look at results of some successful pro-am collaborations highlighting the contribution made by citizen scientists.  Using results obtained from multiple ~0.4m telescopes I will look at opportunities for maximising the science return from the observations obtained.