What do you do when you have too much astronomy data to go thru? You call on the public to help. In this case, it was to find Exoplanets.

Citizen scientists discover five tightly packed exoplanets

Five new planets have been discovered outside our solar system, all orbiting a sun-like star located within the constellation Aquarius, nearly 620 light years from Earth. The alien worlds are considered super-Earths, sizing in at two to three times larger than our own blue planet.

From article, (In 2017, Ian Crossfield, assistant professor of physics at MIT, who at the time was a Sagan Fellow at the University of California at Santa Cruz, worked with fellow astronomer Jesse Christiansen at Caltech to make the K2 data public and enlist as many volunteers as they could in the search for exoplanets.

The team used a popular citizen-scientist platform called Zooniverse to create its own project, dubbed Exoplanet Explorers. The project was inspired by a similar effort via Zooniverse called Planet Hunters, which has enabled users to sift through and classify both Kepler and K2 data.

For the Exoplanet Explorers project, Crossfield and Christiansen first ran a signal-detection algorithm to identify potential transit signals in the K2 data, then made those signals available on the Zooniverse platform. They designed a training program to first teach users what to look for in determining whether a signal is a planetary transit. Users could then sift through actual light curves from the K2 mission and click “yes” or “no,” depending on whether they thought the curve looked like a transit.

At least 10 users would have to look at a potential signal, and 90 percent of these users would have to vote “yes,” for Crossfield and Christiansen to consider the signal for further analysis.

“We put all this data online and said to the public, ‘Help us find some planets,’” Crossfield says. “It’s exciting, because we’re getting the public excited about science, and it’s really leveraging the power of the human cloud.”

Several months into working with Zooniverse to get Exoplanet Explorers up and running, the researchers got a call from an Australian television program that was offering to feature the project on live television. The team scrambled to launch the effort, and over two days in April, as the program was broadcast live, Exoplanet Explorers drew 10,000 users who started sifting through the K2 data. Over 48 hours, the users made nearly 2 million classifications from the available light curves.

Crossfield and Christiansen, along with NASA astronomer Geert Barentsen, looked more closely at the classifications flagged by the public and determined that many of them were indeed objects of interest. In particular, the effort identified 44 Jupiter-sized, 72 Neptune-sized, and 44 Earth-sized planets, as well as 53 so-called super Earths, which are larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune.)

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