Citizen Science Hits Outer Space in Search of New Planets
NASA’s Kepler mission positioned a powerful telescope outside Earth’s atmosphere last year to begin taking pictures of a section of space known to house about 200,000 stars. For Yale astronomers this presents an incredible opportunity — to discover which of those stars have planets orbiting them.
Debra Fischer is an expert planet hunter. She says, “The Kepler mission will likely quadruple the number of planets that have been found in the last 15 years.”
These exoplanets — as planets outside our solar system are called — also provide a great opportunity to enlist the services of the public to help sift through the massive amounts of data in search of new planets.
Dr. Fischer adds, “And it’s terrific that NASA is releasing this amazing data into the public domain.”
To help analyze data, astronomers created Planet Hunters, a website where anyone can help discover new planets. It is part of Zooniverse, an online set of citizen science projects relating to space and weather.
Kevin Schawinksi, one of the founders of Galaxy Zoo, the first Zooniverse project says with the help of the Internet the project has assemble the largest distributed supercomputer dedicated to pattern recognition.
He says, “We’ve linked up over 300,000 human brains and turned it into a science machine.”
The whole Zooniverse is made of the following projects: (WARNING: Participation may be fun)
Planet Hunters
The Milky Way Project
Old Weather
Moon Zoo
Galaxy Zoo: Hubble
Solar Stormwatch
Galaxy Zoo: Mergers
Galaxy Zoo: Supernovae
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