Stargazing Live viewers find four-planet solar system via crowd-sourcing project

Australian volunteer citizen scientists find four previously unknown planets orbiting a nearby star thanks to a crowd-sourcing project aired on the ABC’s Stargazing Live.

The four “Super Earth” planets are about double the size of Earth and are orbiting a star in the Aquarius constellation 600 light years away, said Dr Chris Lintott, the principal investigator of Zooniverse.

ABC and iview April 4-6

Professor Brian Cox and Julia Zemiro were joined by scientists and personalities to inspire Australia to explore our solar system. Look back as they tackled astronomy’s most intriguing questions, live from Siding Spring Observatory.

On Tuesday night, Stargazing Live viewers were called on to hunt exoplanets by trawling through observations of about 100,000 stars via a project on the Zooniverse website, which shows recently downloaded data from the Kepler Space Telescope.

What they found excited astronomers.

In 48 hours dozens of candidates were discovered, and four planets were confirmed to be orbiting a star in our interstellar neighbourhood, Dr Lintott said.

The star’s planets were “crammed together” and indicated there may be more planets further from the star, he said.

“They’re all much closer to the star than even Mercury is to the Sun,” he said.

Source: Stargazing Live viewers find four-planet solar system via crowd-sourcing project – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)