Planet hunting citizen scientists produce quick results for astronomers

Physical and Biological Sciences News

In this computer animation of the four-planet system, the planet orbits are to scale and planet sizes are to scale with each other, but not with the star and the size of the orbits. (Credit: Simone Duca)Chris Lintott of Zooniverse shows 'Stargazing Live' hosts Brian Cox and Julia Zemiro the possible planets found so far by the Exoplanet Explorers project, using gumballs to represent different types of planets.Four UCSC undergraduates worked with astronomer Ian Crossfield to develop the Exoplanet Explorers project: Nithesh Balasubramanian, Nihaal Zaveri, Yyue Yu, and Nicholas Gehlken.Thousands of volunteer citizen scientists jumped at the opportunity to help astronomers discover new planets, yielding quick results for a team led by UC Santa Cruz astronomer Ian Crossfield. The Exoplanet Explorers project, launched in early April on Zooniverse, a popular citizen science platform, has already identified nearly 200 candidate planets, including a new four-planet system.
Crossfield's team had been working with Zooniverse for months to develop the project when they got a surprise invitation to have it featured on a live television program, 'ABC Stargazing Live', to be broadcast in Australia. The researchers quickly got the project ready to launch, uploading two large sets of data for volunteers to classify. The program, hosted by British astronomer Brian Cox and Australian television personality Julia Zemiro, was presented over three nights starting April 4. More than 10,000 users participated in the project in the first 48 hours, generating more than 2 million classifications.
"It would have taken our small team months to wade through all this data, so this is very useful for us. And we got thousands of people interested in the science of exoplanets," said Crossfield, a Sagan Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Santa Cruz.  
K2 Mission
Crossfield's team is using K2, the continuing mission of NASA's Kepler spacecraft, to search for planets around red dwarf stars. By measuring the brightness of stars, ...

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