Stargazers invited to hunt planets beyond solar system

A CALL has been made for armchair astronomers to help in a search for planets outside the solar system.

The online citizen project is enlisting the help of the public to examine five years’ worth of digital footage showing some of the brightest stars in the sky.

The footage was captured by 12 robotic telescopes based at the European Southern Observatory Paranal Observatory in Chile.

Dr Meg Schwamb, an astronomer at the School of Mathematics and Physics at Queen’s University Belfast, a leading partner in the Planet Hunters Nextgeneration Transit Search (NGTS) project, said: “If the orbit of an exoplanet is seen at just the right angle from Earth, we may observe the planet passing directly in front of its host star, known as a transit.

“This causes the planet to periodically block a portion of the starlight we observe, and the star appears to dim ever so slightly for a few hours. Every 10 seconds, the NGTS telescopes capture the light from thousands of stars in the sky looking for the tell-tale signatures of an exoplanet transit.

“Computers are searching through the NGTS observations looking for the tell-tale repeated dips in starlight due to planet transits. The automated algorithms produce lots and lots of possible candidate transit events that need to be reviewed by the NGTS team to confirm whether they are real or not.

“Most of the things spotted by the computers are not due to exoplanets, but a small handful of these candidates are new bona fide planet discoveries.”

Prof Christopher Watson, deputy head of the School of Mathematics and Physics at Queen’s, said that they wanted the public’s help to sift through the observations flagged by the project’s algorithms to search for possible hidden planets not found in the first review.

“Most planets in the data will have already been found by the NGTS team, but volunteers just might be the first on this planet to find a brand-new world orbiting another star in our galaxy,” he said.

The NGTS is a collaboration between Queen’s, the universities of Warwick, Cambridge and Leicester, Geneva Observatory, German Aerospace Centre, Universidad de Chile, the Universidad Catolica del Norte, and the European Southern Observatory.

There is no application process to join the Planet Hunters NGTS project.

Anyone with a web browser can search for possible hidden worlds and help check the best candidate planets identified on planethunters.org