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Public Crowd-sourcing Finds New Exoplanets (abc.net.au)

Posted by BeauHD on from the lost-and-found dept.

brindafella writes: A participant in a TV program "Stargazing Live" on Australia's ABC TV channel has found four planets closely orbiting a star, using an online database. Astrophysicist Dr Chris Lintott, the principal investigator of Zooniverse, reported on Thursday's show that four "Super Earth" planets had been identified in the data. They orbit closer to their star than Mercury does to our Sun. The person responsible for the find, Andrew Grey, is a mechanic by day and amateur astronomer in his spare time, and lives in the city of Darwin, Northern Territory. The data is sourced from NASA's Kepler Space Telescope. "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."

15 comments

  1. Re: Slashdot readers hate America by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Ummm... OK then.

  2. multiple people by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    It was multiple people that found the four planets not one.
    One of them found two of them from what was said in the TV show, but they listed about 6 names in total.
    That's not what was so cool about this though. There are multiple crowdsourced planet finding projects.

    What's awesome about this, is that it was 4 planets, around the same star, all closer in than mercury is to our sun.

  3. Re:YUO fAIL IT by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    goat

  4. Re:Slashdot readers hate America by Maritz · · Score: 1, Insightful

    I'm sick of the revisionist history and warmongering from Europeans.

    We're all exactly the same. Are all Americans as stupid as you? I hope not.

    --
    I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
  5. Re: YUO fAIL IT by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Fart

  6. New? by rossdee · · Score: 1, Insightful

    I doubt these are actually new planets, just ones we didnt know about before

    1. Re:New? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, no, they were just built last week.

      One of them still has Slartibartfast's signature on a glacier.

    2. Re:New? by sysrammer · · Score: 1

      No, no, they were just built last week.

      One of them still has Slartibartfast's signature on a glacier.

      Would this be built to the plans of Terra Mk. I or Mk. II?

      --
      His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
  7. The new bitcoin by goombah99 · · Score: 2

    Instead of using heat production to mine for currency why not use planet finding? It's something that's hard to do but significantly easier to verify than it is to find in the first place. And it's useful.

    In general we need a new bitcoin model that creates things of value in the process of mining. For example, perhaps genome assembly or finding primes.

    --
    Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
  8. It wasn't just the Ausies! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The same crowdsourced event was also on the BBC as Stargazing Live is a BBC/ABC collaboration. So it was also the plucky brits as well as us.