TV Viewer Finds Planet in Crowdsourcing Space Hunt
BBC news is reporting that a UK TV viewer has spotted an unknown world beyond our solar system following a public planet hunting push initiated on a BBC programme.
Chris Holmes, an amateur astronomer from Peterborough detected the planet after logging onto the crowdsourcing website Planethunters.org and by looking through time-lapsed images of stars.
The planet appears to be circling a star dubbed SPH10066540 and is thought to be similar in size to Neptune. It is believed to have a radius around 3.8 times that of Earth and orbits its star at 55million km, which is similar to the distance between Mercury and our Sun.
The data that the website holds has been beamed down to Earth from NASA’s Kepler telescope which is scanning a region of space that has many stars similar to the Sun. Volunteers are asked to find things that computers and scientists may have missed.
“I’ve never had a telescope. I’ve had a passing interest in where things are in the sky, but never had any more knowledge about it than that,” Mr Holmes told BBC News. “Being involved in a project like this and actually being the one to find something is a very exciting position.”
Since the Planethunters website was launched last year more than 100,000 volunteers have scanned around a million images.
At the moment the new planet is at candidate status which means that more checking has to be done before the discovery can be fully confirmed. But according to Chris Lintott, the lead scientist on the project the indications look strong.
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