Lately it seems like everyone has been discovering new exoplanets far beyond our solar system. In the case of a new citizen science project called Exoplanet Explorers, literally anyone can help comb through Kepler Space Telescope data to identify new exoplanets – and within just two days of launching, the crowdsourced effort found four super-Earths orbiting the same star.
Thousands of people visited the Exoplanet Explorers website this week to sift Kepler's data from across the universe and the effort quickly yielded results. Four planets, unofficially known as EE-1b, EE-1c, EE-1d and EE-1e were discovered orbiting a sun-like star 597 light years away in the constellation Aquarius. The two planets orbiting closest to the star are both roughly twice the size of Earth, while the third and fourth are 2.74 and 2.22 times larger, respectively.
It's not likely we'll be putting these planets down on our list to visit once we finally figure out interstellar travel, though. These rocky planets are much closer to their star than even Mercury is to the Sun, taking between three and 13 days to complete one orbit, so they're likely to be more than a little toasty.
The scientists that oversee Exoplanet Explorers will now head the writing of a paper on the discovery that will then be submitted and peer reviewed for publication in a scientific journal.
Exoplanet Explorers is a project of the Zooniverse online citizen science platform developed by the University of Oxford, Chicago's Adler Planetarium and other research organizations. It allows anyone to volunteer to help comb through light curves of distant stars collected by Kepler to look for the tell-tale "dip" that indicates a planet may be briefly blocking out that light as it orbits.
Previous Zooniverse projects have tapped the crowd to look for gravitational lenses, detect asteroids and analyze images of Mars.
In addition to the four-planet system, only the 73rd system with four or more exoplanets to be discovered, the project has also found another planet just slightly larger than Earth about 400 light years away, a super-Earth 390 light years away, a Jupiter-sized planet 700 light years away and a number of other potential planet candidates, all in just a few days. If you want to join the hunt yourself, check out this link.
Source: Zooniverse