The Developing and Testing of a Software to Help the Search for Exoplanets

Exoplanets are planets orbiting stars other than our sun. The first such exoplanet was discovered in 1992. Up until today, only around 5000 exoplanets have been discovered.

For amateurs it has been possible to detect already known exoplanets. However, it has so far been impossible to discover new exoplanets, simply because there was no software capable of searching a large enough dataset for exoplanets. The product of this project, the software ExoScanner, aims to change that.

This Matura paper describes the ideas and algorithms which are implemented in ExoScanner. ExoScanner makes the search for exoplanets accessible to amateur astronomers with medium to high-end imaging equipment. ExoScanner’s key feature is its ability to automatically check a whole frame for exoplanets while keeping the running-time low. Other applications are only capable of analysing one star at a time. This significant reduction in the effort required to analyse an image-sequence for exoplanet-transits could motivate many amateurs to run ExoScanner on their own data, possibly revealing new exoplanets.