This is how you could help discover hidden planets from your home
ARMCHAIR astronomers can now go on the hunt to find hidden planets from home.
Volunteers can explore five years’ worth of digital footage showing the brightest stars in the sky as part of a new citizens project.
Enchanting footage was captured by 12 Planet Hunters Next-Generation Transit Search (NGTS) robotic telescopes, based at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) Paranal Observatory in Chile.
Researchers now need help from the human eye to analyse the footage in more detail.
Queen’s University Belfast is one of the key partners in the project.
Dr Meg Schwamb, an astronomer in the School of Mathematics and Physics at Queen’s University Belfast, and leader of the 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.’
Dr Schwamb added that the NGTS telescopes capture the light from thousands of stars in the sky every ten seconds.
She said: ‘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.’
Anyone with a web browser can start searching for these possible hidden worlds and help check the best candidate planets identified on the website.
Hundreds of volunteers have already signed up to the project.
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Professor Christopher Watson, deputy head of the School of Mathematics and Physics at Queen’s, said they want the public’s help to sift through the observations flagged by their algorithms to search for possible hidden planets not found in the first review.
He said: ‘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.’
There is no application process to join the Planet Hunters NGTS project.
You can go and hunt for hidden planets at the website here.