Fancy analyzing light curves yourself? Discover new worlds with Zooniverse.
by Ruth Titz-Weider (DLR), February 2025
This is your chance to get actively involved in the search for new exoplanets – comfortably from your home.
Zooniverse is the world’s largest citizen science platform, where humans from all over the world come together to collaborate on real scientific projects. One of these projects is the search for extrasolar planets, i.e. planets around a different star outside our Solar System.
Zooniverse gives you the chance to analyze real data from the telescope complex NGTS (Next Generation Transit Survey) in Chile, and to investigate light curves. You don’t need a scientific background to participate. The Zooniverse project Planet Hunters Next Generation Transit Survey NGTS gives you easy to understand instructions so that everyone – from school student to pensioner – can make a valuable contribution. Every discovery you make can help to learn more about potential new worlds.
This is how to get involved:
- Visit the Planet Hunters website on Zooniverse.
- If you want, you can register an account so that your contributions can be properly credited later.
- Follow the instructions and start analysing real telescope data.
- Become a part of a growing community of discoverers and share your findings with others.
Your participation could mean the next big breakthrough in exoplanet research.
Planet Hunters Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) has already found some planet candidates.
More on that in an article published in April 2024 in The Astronomical Journal: Planet Hunters NGTS: New Planet Candidates from a Citizen Science Search of the Next Generation Transit Survey Public Data