Planet Hunters

Astrogeology, Asteroids, Robots, Space Flight & Extraterrestrial Matters

Welcome to Planet Hunters. With your help, we are looking for planets around other stars. The NASA Kepler spacecraft is one of the most powerful tools in the search for extrasolar planets (exoplanets), planets orbiting stars outside of our own Solar System, and its discoveries continue to revolutionize our understanding of how planetary systems grow and evolve. Approximately every 30 minutes, Kepler monitors the brightness of many thousands of stars simultaneously for the signature of exoplanets via the transit technique. When an exoplanet passes or transits in front of its parent star, the star momentarily dims. This decrease in brightness is detectable by Kepler and lasts for a few hours or more and repeats once per orbit of the planet. The time series of brightness measurements for a star is called a light curve. Automated computers are sifting through the Kepler light curves looking for the repeating signal of a planet transit, but they think there will be planets which can only be found via the innate human ability for pattern recognition.

At Planet Hunters they are enlisting the public help to inspect the Kepler light curves and find these planets missed by automated detection algorithms. All you need is your keen eyes and a web browser to join the hunt. On December 16, 2010, the Zooniverse launched the original Planet Hunters to enlist the public help to search data from the NASA Kepler spacecraft for the characteristic drop in light due to an orbiting extrasolar planets (exoplanets) crossing in front of their parent stars. Back then they did not know what they would find. The project was a gamble on the ability of human pattern recognition to beat machines just occasionally and spot the telltale dip from a transiting planet that was missed by automated routines looking for repeating patterns. It may have been the case that no new planets were discovered and that computers had the job down to a fine art.

Original URL: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/nora-dot-eisner/planet-hunters-tess/about/research