Crowdsource Hunt for Planets in 48 Hours

January 17, 2012 By IdeaConnection

Venture into deep space from the comfort of your computer with the latest space-themed crowdsource initiative. Members of the public are being asked by the Planethunters website to hunt for planets that could support life.

The site has been up and running for more than a year but to tie in with a BBC series of programmes volunteers are being asked to classify 500,000 targets within the next 48 hours.

Anyone can visit the site and view time-lapsed images of 150,000 stars, taken by the Kepler space telescope. These are pictures that up until now have only been available to professional astronomers, yet organisers of the exoplanet hunt are confident that there are still planets hidden somewhere in the data.

There’s plenty of advice on the site on the signs that indicate the presence of planets and how to report your find to the experts. No previous scientific training is needed though an interest in astronomy and cosmology will help.

“We know that people will find planets that are missed by the computer,” said Chris Lintott from Oxford University in an interview with the BBC.

“When humans have looked at data, we know they find planets that computers can’t.”

If a volunteer makes a discovery that turns out to be a planet they will be credited and their name mentioned in the relative scientific literature. They won’t however, be able to name the planet as the planet names are derived from the stars they orbit.

The Kepler Telescope

Launched in 2009 the Kepler telescope searches a region of space that has many stars similar to our own sun. So far it has discovered 2,326 candidate planets including more than 200 Earth-sized planets.


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