Amateur scientists find four new planets while watching TV

Australian amateur scientists have discovered four new planets in space, without the need for a telescope and all from the comfort of their own home.

Four ‘super earth’ planets were discovered by viewers of Stargazing Live, an ABC TV show which on Tuesday looked at research being done by Oxford University.

In it, the show’s viewers were called on to join the hunt for planets by using a website set up by Zooniverse, a crowd-funded Astrophysics group within the University.

Footage of more than 100,000 stars from the powerful Kepler Space Telescope has been uploaded online, and in trawling through the shots space lovers struck gold.

Said to be close to double the size of earth, the four planets are ‘crammed together’ and ‘much closer to the star than even Mercury is to the Sun’, Zooniverse principal investigator Dr Chris Lintott told the ABC.

‘The closest of them whips around in just three-and-a-half days, so a year is only three-and-a-half days long,’ Dr Lintott said.

Source: Amateur scientists find four new planets while watching TV | Daily Mail Online