If you have ambitions of discovering the next important exoplanet, now is your chance.
Last Monday, Feb. 13, a team that involves researchers from MIT and the Carnegie Institution for Science released more than 61,000 astronomical observations to the public, a huge dataset that includes over 1,600 nearby stars.
Recruiting The Public In Exoplanet Search
Paving the way for new recruits in the search for planets beyond the solar system, the newly available dataset was taken for over two decades by Hawaii’s W.M. Keck Observatory and comes with an open-source software package for data processing and online tutorial.
“[W]e realized there just aren't enough of us on the team to be doing as much science as could come out of this dataset," said MIT postdoctoral fellow Jennifer Burt in a statement, emphasizing a shift toward community-oriented strategies such as crowdsourcing in their scientific pursuits.
The international team recently announced the discovery of more than a hundred new exoplanet candidates through a method called radial velocity. This technique, deemed one of the most successful in finding and confirming planetary presence, exploits the fact that a planet’s gravity also affects the star it is orbiting.
There’s “a ton of science to be done,” Burt proclaimed.
“One of our key goals in this paper is to democratize the search for planets," said team member Greg Laughlin from Yale, explaining that anyone can download the velocities on the website and use their open-source software to try fitting planets from the data.
The exoplanet search, it seems, is no longer exclusive to missions like NASA’s Kepler and K2 missions. The Kepler space telescope, for instance, seeks them out through looking for stars that regularly dim slightly, with the dimming believed to be caused by the exoplanet blocking some of the starlight when it passes in front.
Radial Velocity At Work
The observations were made using the High Resolution Echelle Spectrometer, an instrument mounted atop the Keck Observatory’s 10-meter telescope at Mauna Kea. It can split the incoming light of a star into a rainbow of colors, allowing scientists to measure the precise intensity of wavelengths to probe the nature and qualities of the starlight.
HIRES can assist in estimating the radial velocity of a star, which is composed of very small star movements either due to its own processes or as a response to an external factor. When a star, for instance, regularly moves toward and away from Earth, then it can herald the presence of an exoplanet that orbits the star. The star is tugged by the planet’s gravity, thus its velocity changes.
HIRES has spotted over 1,600 so-called neighborhood stars, each within 325 light-years from our planet and with observations ranging from 30 seconds to 20 minutes based on the level of precision needed in measuring.
Now with more eyes on the skies using the publicly available database, more than 100 stars likely to host exoplanets can be more closely inspected through added measurements or further data analysis.
The team, however, confirmed the presence of an exoplanet orbiting GJ 411, the fourth closest to the solar system and has a star mass that’s about 40 percent of our sun. Now the hope is pinned on observers finding similar candidates.
Details of the dataset and related findings are discussed in the Astrophysical Journal.
