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Australian volunteer citizen scientists have found
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.
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.
"The closest of them whips around in just three-and-a-half days, so a year is only three-and-a-half days long."More than 7,000 volunteers classified over 1.5 million points of interest as part of the Exoplanet Explorers project, led by Dr Ian Crossfield from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Dr Lintott said he was excited to see the impact of just two days of crowd-sourcing data.
"From experience we're talking the equivalent of a single astronomer working for a couple of years straight, no coffee breaks, no nipping to the loo [to complete this data]," he said.
Stargazing Live host Professor Brian Cox said he could not be more excited about the discovery.
"In the seven years I've been making Stargazing Live this is the most significant scientific discovery we've ever made. The results are astonishing," he said.The four discovered planets are most likely rocky and far too hot to support human life, Dr Lintott said.
But he said the discovery was important scientifically because it was one of only one or two other systems he knew of where planets were packed together and it might tell astronomers more about how planets form.
Citizen scientists to be listed as co-authors on paper
Scientists are trying to contact all of the discoverers of the new solar system, with the volunteers who classified the system's data to be listed as co-authors on a scientific paper about the discovery.
"We're just trying to get in touch with them now," Dr Lintott said.
"Lots of Australians will be waking up to a message in their inbox saying they've discovered an exciting planet."
NASA's Kepler Space Telescope has led to the discovery of thousands of exoplanets by measuring the brightness of faraway stars.
When a planet passes in front of the star, the star briefly dims or "blinks".
"So what we're actually looking for is a repeated pattern of blinks," Dr Lintott said.
"It's that pattern of blinks that tells us that something is in orbit around it."
The Exoplanet Explorers project is the first time citizen scientists have been able to collaborate and classify "fresh" data from Kepler, as opposed to other projects that use archival data, Dr Lintott said.
"[The data] came down from Kepler via NASA's deep space network in Canberra just a few weeks ago, and so this is almost real-time intervention," Dr Lintott said."If we can get that going that's exciting. It means we can get discoveries faster but it also means we can follow up on discoveries faster.
"So I'm very encouraged that, at least with the help of the ABC, it's possible to get through large amounts of data very quickly."
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