Researchers Call for Armchair Astronomers to Help Find Unknown Hidden Worlds
upstart writes:
Researchers call for armchair astronomers to help find unknown hidden worlds:
Astronomers at the University of Warwick have joined partners around the world in launching a new online initiative, calling for volunteers to come forward and help to search for extrasolar planets.
The online citizen project, Planet Hunters Next-Generation Transit Search (NGTS), is enlisting the help of the public to examine five years' worth of digital footage showing some of the brightest stars in the sky.
The footage was captured by twelve NGTS robotic telescopes based at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) Paranal Observatory in Chile-they make high precision measurements, sensitive enough to detect the signatures of exoplanets.
[...] "Computers are searching through the NGTS observations looking for the telltale repeated dips in starlight due to planet transits. The automated algorithms produce lots and lots of possible candidate transit events that need to be reviewed by the NGTS team to confirm whether they are real or not.
"Most of things spotted by the computers are not due to exoplanets, but a small handful of these candidates are new bona fide planet discoveries."
While the NGTS team reviews the most interesting objects identified by computers, humans are still better at picking out the signals of transiting planets-and the team thinks there may still be planets lurking in the data that the computers missed.
There is no application process to join the Planet Hunters NGTS project. Anyone with a web browser can dive right into the data and start searching for these possible hidden worlds and helping to check the best candidate planets identified on the website.
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