Essay On Virtual Astronomers

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Virtual Astronomers look to Web, not sky by Vincent S. Foster
Not every amateur astronomer needs a telescope to hunt for undiscovered planets. Some are virtual astronomers who look to the Web, not the sky, to find planets beyond our solar system.
They are among 280,000 citizen scientists from around the world participating in the Planet Hunter Program at the Zooniverse, where they analyze changes in a star’s brightness to detect transiting Exoplanets.
The Planet Hunter Program relies on the fact that humans are better at visually recognizing patterns than computers. The program’s website displays a star’s light curve on a graph collected by NASA’s Kepler Space Mission and asks the citizen scientist at home to look at it and see how the brightness of the star changes over time. Periods of reduced brightness is usually evidence of planetary transits.
So far, over 20 million observations have been analyzed since late 2010. Out of those, 3,500 candidate planets have been found. This includes a novel Neptune-like planet that is illuminated by four different suns. This may seem like something out of “Star Wars” where Luke Skywalker’s home planet Tatooine was graced with two setting suns, but the recently discovered planet with its four suns is real.
The planet was discovered by two volunteer virtual astronomers, Dr. Robert Gagliano, an oncologist from Arizona, and Kian Jek, a semi-retired computer executive from California, collaborating over the Internet. While analyzing the star system, Gagliano noticed the signal of a possible transiting planet. He then noted that the planet appeared to transit twice, with an orbit of 137 days. Gagliano posted his observations on the Planet Hunter’s online forum where it was noticed by Kian J...

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...sion between two smaller galaxies, and smaller scars such as warped disks, large bulges or long streams of stars bear testament to the complexity of these galaxies' lives.
Disentangling these effects, and many more, requires the largest possible samples of classified galaxies. Modern surveys provide enough images - hundreds of thousands upon hundreds of thousands of them - but people are needed to classify them. That's why virtual astronomers are needed.
There are many other projects at Zooniverse that require the help of virtual astronomers to find undiscovered gravitational lenses…map seasonal features on the surface of mars…identify craters on the Moon…and study explosions on the sun. All are only a mouse click away at Zooniverse.
END
Word count: 1,744

Vincent S. Foster
37 Brigantine Blvd.
Waretown, NJ 08753
USA
Tel: 609-488-5898
Email: grantfinder1@aol.com

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