With the airing of the BBCs live astronomy show Stargazing Live presented by Dara O’Brien and Professor Brian Cox (Who I affectionately refer to as Monkey Boy) comes a new landslide of volunteer online planet hunters.
These volunteers have all signed up to help astronomers find possible exoplanets by analysing around 150,000 light curves gathered from distant stars in the Cygnus constellation by NASAs Kepler Spacecraft.
The basic principal is fairly simple. If we monitor the light levels given of by a star we should be able to detect the sudden dips that occur when an orbiting planet passed between us and the star.
In practice these dips can be rather tricky to spot. Its not so bad if the planet is comparable in size to one of our solar systems gas giants as these sized planets block out a lot of the stars light. But spotting a small planet like our own blue marble is much harder especially against a lot of background cosmic noise.
So far to date I’ve looked at over 400 curves myself and have spotted one possible exoplanet in orbit around a star with the rather catchy name of SPH10095346 (It’s light curve is shown below). Alas I cannot claim to have been the first to discover this exoplanet in fact I’m probably about the 100th.
The website is a pleasure to use and features several tutorials, instructional videos and plenty of examples to get you up and analysing. So why not log in and help out. Who knows you could end up the first to discover a new world.
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