Discovery of the Smallest Ever Ultra-Short-Period Planet Using Novel Phase Folding Detection System Parallelized on a Cheap GPU
Kaitlyn Wang · San José, California
George D. Yancopoulos Innovator Award ($75,000) · Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair · 2023
A phase-folding detection algorithm for ultra-short-period exoplanets — worlds that orbit their star in under a day — designed to run on inexpensive consumer GPU hardware rather than the large compute clusters previous methods required.
Reported faster and higher-precision detection than existing approaches, and the discovery of the smallest ultra-short-period planet found at the time.
The hardware constraint is stated in the title, which tells you it was the design driver and not a limitation apologised for later. Making a method run on cheap hardware is a scientific contribution when the cost of compute is what has been limiting the search.
- Phase-folding transit detection
- GPU parallelisation on consumer hardware
- Public survey photometry analysis
- Precision and recovery characterisation
- A constraint you chose deliberately belongs in the title, not the limitations section
- Public survey archives put genuinely frontier astronomy within reach of a student with a GPU
- Precision and speed are separate claims; this project made both
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