Citizen Scientists Celebrate 10 Years of Being Online ‘Planet Hunters’

As technology continues to develop at pace, we are increasingly learning more about the universe in which we live. With ever-more sophisticated telescopes and AI technology processing unprecedented amounts of data from the skies above, we are learning more about the planets and systems that exist in space than ever before.

The ironic thing is that we now actually have more data than we can process and this only set to increase in the years to come. In addition, it has been widely noted by the professional space community that whilst having the speed to process billions of images and data sets, computers simply aren’t able to spot anomalies in quite the same way as humans can.

This is primarily because computers are trained to look for specific and clear patterns, and not all space anomalies follow these specific guidelines. The human brain is exceptional at deciphering the data which it is presented with and evaluating it accordingly. It means that many planets have been discovered by the human eye which may otherwise have been missed by even the most sophisticated of computer programs.

Recognising the value that humans still bring to the pursuit of space exploration, the general public now have the opportunity to contribute to spotting potential signs of exoplanets and even being credited for its discovery. Planet Hunters is a citizen science project which was created to help discover more exoplanets through using the power of the people. It invites volunteers to analyze data from the NASA Kepler space telescope and the NASA Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and highlight any discrepancies in the light beams that could indicate the presence of a planet. The site, which can be accessed anywhere via the internet and on any device, was launched by a team led by Debra Fischer at Yale University, as part of the Zooniverse project. Having launched on 16th December 2010, the project is about to celebrate its tenth anniversary and continues to grow from strength to strength.

At the time of writing, the project has over 25,000 volunteers and has made over 10,000 classifications on almost 20,000 subjects. The Zooniverse website states, ‘The recently launched Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is providing us with a huge amount of data that lets us look for planets outside of our own Solar System, including planets that could support life. With your help, we are going to find planets that will help us understand how these extrasolar systems form and evolve over time. The results may even bring us closer to answering the question that we all want to answer: Are we alone in the Universe?’

You may be wondering what exactly an Exoplanet is. Well put simply, they are planets which lie beyond our own Solar System and orbit stars other than the sun. We already know from our own solar system that the Earth has been able to sustain life due to its orbiting distance from the sun, keeping conditions warm enough to maintain liquid water but not so hot that it evaporates completely. The theory is that other planets which circle their own stars may also have conditions similar to ours and that these could possibly have the potential to sustain life. Exoplanets have been of great interest to the space community ever since the first one was discovered in the last 20th century, and literally billions of exoplanets have been identified since then. Not only have we found exoplanets that resemble our own solar system, we’ve also found unusual combinations too, such as those orbiting close to their star or planets which orbit multiple stars.

Citizen scientists can participate in analyzing data from the TESS by simply logging on to the site and clicking the ‘Classify’ tab. They can then observe data which has been collated using the ‘Transit Method’, which essentially searches for stars by monitoring periodic dips in the brightness. These dips often are caused by an object orbiting across the front of the star, thereby blocking some of the light for a short period of time.

Thanks to the contributions of TESS, new discoveries are being made each week, including the recent detection of two new warm planets orbiting inactive M dwarfs. According to the report, they are about 2.7 and 1.4 times larger than the Earth, and both are warmer too. TESS continues to conduct a survey over 200,000 of the brightest stars near the sun with the sole aim of discovering transiting exoplanets. To date, TESS has identified nearly 2,000 potential exoplanets, of which less than 70 have been confirmed so far. This demonstrates just how much more we have to learn about the universe around us and what potential discoveries may be just around the corner, out of sight.