Enlarge / The telescope array of the Next Generation Transit Survey. (credit: NGTS )
If you’ve ever wanted to search for distant worlds, your time has come. The team behind a planet-hunting telescope variety called the Next-Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) is looking for help with the large volume of data the instrument has produced. The NGTS scans large areas of the sky with a collection of small , robotic telescopes to detect dips in stars’ light that are caused by a planet passing between the stars and Earth.
The team now has a lot of data, which it has sifted through using computers. But computers have difficulty distinguishing a likely planet from various sources of noise, so the particular researchers are asking the public to double-check the computers and provide the final call on what a signal is.
Public transits
One of typically the most successful means of searching for exoplanets has been this transit method, in which a new telescope repeatedly observes the amount of light originating from some sort of star. If a planet wanders in front of that star, the amount of light will dip slightly. These dips have a very stereotypical shape if you plot them over time in what’s called a light curve, with a fairly steep drop as the planet swings in front of the star, followed by a good long, flat reduction.
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