Planet Hunters Project – Common Man Helps NASA Discover New Planets

Planet Hunters, an entirely new project of its kind, launched in last December has certainly paid off. In this initiative almost 40,000 web users around the globe have been helping the NASA in analyzing the data collected from over 150000 stars with an aim of finding similar to our earth.

It may be hard to believe but under this projec,t users get to analyze the real and almost complete scientific data obtained from NASA’s Kepler mission. This mission solely focuses on finding planets outside our solar system. What’s really exciting about all this is that astronomers from Yale University have announced the discovery of first two exoplanets (planets outside our solar system) by Planet Hunter users. “This is the first time that the public has used data from a NASA space mission to detect possible planets orbiting other stars,” said Yale astronomer and exoplanet expert Debra Fischer, who helped launch the Planet Hunters project.

The planets under consideration have much shorter time of revolution around their stars and have wide variation in geometrical dimensions. It takes around 10-50 days to complete one revolution and they have radius almost equal to two-third to eight times that of the earth. Despite these difference one of the exoplanet is said to be rocky in nature same as the earth. But still conformation for sustenance of life is to be made and its chances seem to be very less.

Further technical studies of these planets host star by a team consisting astronomers at Yale, the University of Oxford and the Adler Planetarium in Chicago using the Keck Observatory in Hawaii produced certain results which discarded these planets from the potential list. But soon the Kepler team announced the discovery of 1200 other planets and it has decided to keep an eye on the highest potential one.

Debra Fischer feels that such a mission is popular only because of keen interest and proper understanding of people and it is just more than right to allow them to actively participate in such missions.

Planet hunters will be now analyzing more data from the Kepler. With each round of analysis the chance and hopes are getting higher and higher.

Source: ScienceDaily

Learn more about Planet Hunters at: Planet Hunters