The official report detailing the evolution of the Planet Hunters program has shown that gamers have helped researcher discover two new potential planets that lie outside of our own solar system.
Planet Hunters has been set up by The University of Oxford and Yale University, in conjunction with a number of other organizations that are focused on the exploration of space and uses the data in the public archives of the Kepler space telescope.
Players are able to look at the data and then track the light emitted by certain start.
When a star is slightly dimmed that might mean that a big body, like a planet, is moving across its face, and if the observation is confirmed then scientists can take a closer look at the phenomenon and see whether there's really something there.
There are more than 150,000 candidate stars for planets in the Kepler archives and scientists do not have the resources to observe them all on their own so they are crowdsourcing this task to willing gamers.
The only reward for them is an acknowledgment in the monthly notices sent out by the The Royal Astronomical Society.
The official report says that, “Planet Hunters is a new citizen science project, designed to engage the public in an exoplanet search using NASA Kepler public release data”, adding, “In the first month after launch, users identified two new planet candidates which survived our checks for false-positives.”
Recently another study showed how players using the online game Foldit were able to help in research that is linked to developing better
drugs to combat AIDS.
They were able to create a better performing protein model which had eluded the science community for years.
It seems that designing video games around simple and repetitive tasks and making them competitive can lead to player engagement and can unleash the power of crowdsourcing.
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