Last Modified: 26 February 2003

Latest News!

The Kepler Mission is funded and work is underway at all of the affiliated organizations. Kepler will search for Earth-size planets in the habitable zones around tens of thousands of stars.

The Vulcan South Project has been funded by the NSF! The project will conduct a photometric transit search for extrasolar planets from the South Pole. The team is now constructing the photometer and working towards a December 2003 deployment of the first winter-over system.

Vulcan Results & Publications

The Vulcan system automation is largely complete. The system has been operating without observers since August 2002. We've spent much of the Fall and Winter tracking down and fixing small bugs, but are now getting data whenever the weather permits.

Methods to assess the significance of photometric transit signals are given in Jenkins, Caldwell, & Borucki, Some Tests to Establish Confidence in Planets Discovered by Transit Photometry, published in the Astrophysical Journal, Jan 2002, Vol 564, p. 495.

A description of the Vulcan photometer and some initial results can be found in Borucki et al. 2001, PASP, Vol 113, p. 439.

HD209458 transit from Vulcan Camera, the last data were taken at an airmass of 4.

On November 22, 1999 the transit of a planet orbiting HD209458 was observed and the predicted amplitude and immersion times were confirmed.

Over one hundred variable stars have been found in each star field. About fifty of these stars are eclipsing binary stars, several with transit amplitudes of only a few percent. Three stars that showed only primary transits were examined with high-precision spectroscopy. Two were found to be nearly identical stars in binary pairs orbiting at double the photometric period. Spectroscopic observations showed the third star to be a high mass-ratio single-lined binary