Title: The Search for Habitable Worlds and Planets around Other Stars

Physics Major: Kevin Burke

Abstract: For the last 25 years, astronomers have been detecting and characterizing exoplanets, planets circling distant stars. One of science’s “holy grails” is finding such a world capable of supporting life as we know it. Today, many of Earth’s most powerful ground-based telescopes are teaming up with space-based telescopes, such as NASA’s Kepler Mission, to detect, identify, and characterize distant alien worlds, resulting in mounds of data waiting to be explored by the scientific community. Here, I examine such data through the Planet Hunters Project, a publicly available tool that students and professionals alike can utilize to both educate themselves and make contributions to the exoplanet hunt.

 Advisor: Dr. Cullen Blake, UPenn