14 DAY TRIAL // Internet surfers using the online Planet Hunters project have recently discovered two new exoplanetary candidates, in a batch of data supplied by the NASA Kepler Telescope. Astronomers say that the discovery is now awaiting official confirmation, but that chances are very high the findings will stand.
Thus far, professional scientists have identified 1,235 potential exoplanets in Kepler datasets, while more than 600 such worlds are officially confirmed by the International Astronomical Union (IAU).
The new discovery marks the first time that citizen scientists were able to identify telltale signs of extrasolar planets in raw readings sent back by a space telescope. Astronomers are now mobilizing ground-based telescopes to verify that the exoplanets are actually there.
It is highly unlikely that any of the two worlds is inhabitable, but one of them is about 2.5 times the mass of Earth, which puts it in the super-Earth class. The other one is more massive, tipping the scale at around 8 Earth masses.
Kepler is uniquely equipped to identify distant worlds, since it is the first spacecraft ever designed specifically for such studies. Launched in 2009, the $600 million spacecraft is constantly looking at a portion of the sky featuring about 150,000 stars.
Its sensitive instruments detect alien planets by analyzing variations in stars' brightness. If dips in brightness occur at regular intervals, then this can be interpreted as a sign that a planetary-sized object is constantly passing in between the stars and the observatory.
“This is the first time that the public has used data from a NASA space mission to detect possible planets orbiting other stars,” explains Debra Fischer, the Yale University astronomer who played an important role in launching the Planet Hunters project.
Astronomers at the University of Oxford and the Adler Planetarium in Chicago are also involved in the project, which aims to get the public involved in analyzing the massive volumes of data Kepler creates.
According to statistics, the Planet Hunters project now features more than 40,000 users. Some of them were recently able to spot the two new candidates in a batch of data that professional astronomers apparently did not browse properly when they analyzed it.
“Obviously Planet Hunters doesn't replace the analysis being done by the Kepler team. But it has proven itself to be a valuable tool in the search for other worlds,” concludes Yale astronomer and Planet Hunters co-founder Meg Schwamb, quoted by Space.