Advanced Science Opportunities: Citizen Astronomers

According to PCmag.com, "The Planet Hunters citizen science website proved its mettle in a big way yesterday with the announcement of its first confirmed planet discovery, which also happens to be the first planet to be found in a quadruple star system.


Citizen Astronomers

The Planet Hunters website, which was launched in December 2010, lets the public search for exoplanets—planets orbiting other stars—in data from NASA’s Kepler planet-search project, which images a star field containing some 160,000 stars, measuring each star’s brightness every half hour. The volunteers look at light curves—graphs showing fluctuations in a star’s brightness over a period of roughly a month—looking for transits, brief dips in a star’s brightness that could indicate the passage of an unseen object, possibly a planet, in front of the star. Public response to this project has been overwhelming; more than 170,000 people have registered at the site."

Planet Hunters