I had a great conversation with Noah Sodickson (high schooler) about ultra-short planets in the NASA Kepler data. He has been filtering the light curves, running astronomers'-favorite “box least squares” and plotting the folded light curves. When he does this in quarters (meaning, cutting the data into 90-day chunks), he can see small variations in the transit shapes. These have been attributed to various things. My goal is to figure out a way to model these variations without averaging the data. Binning is sinning, after all. Sodickson can see that everything we see is a strong function of how we filter the light curves, so we have to think pretty hard about that.
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