More than 5,000 planets have been confirmed to exist outside our solar system, with a wide variety of features such as glass clouds and twin suns. Scientists estimate that there could be millions more exoplanets in our galaxy alone, which means that professional astronomers could use your help to track and study them.
And this is where the Exoplanet Watch project comes into play. Participants in this program can use their own telescopes to detect planets outside our solar system, or they can search data from other telescopes for exoplanets using a computer or smartphone.
Observing Exoplanets began in 2018 under NASA’s Learning Universe, one of the agency’s Science Activation Network programs that allows anyone to experience how scientific investigations are conducted and discover the universe for themselves. Until recently there were limits on how many people could help examine the data collected by other telescopes, but now this program is easily available to anyone. By following the instructions on the website, participants can download data to their device or access it via the cloud, and can then evaluate it using a customized data analysis tool.
“With Exoplanet Observation, you can learn to track exoplanets and do data analysis using the software that NASA scientists use,” said Rob Zellem, creator of this program and an astrophysicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL, for his acronym in English) of NASA in southern California. “We are excited to show more people how scientific research on exoplanets is actually carried out.”
help without telescope
Participants without telescopes can help astronomers review data that has already been collected. The project has 10 years of exoplanet observations, collected by a small ground-based telescope south of Tucson, Arizona. In 2023, the project will begin collecting additional data from two other telescopes from the Table Mountain facility in southern California, which is managed by JPL.
These telescopes look at nearby stars and look for what scientists call an exoplanet transit: a regular dip in a star’s brightness caused by the passage of a planet between that star and Earth. Essentially, a transit is the observation of a planet’s silhouette against the bright glow of its star.
Different NASA telescopes look at transiting exoplanets as a way to discover new planets, but Exoplanet Watch participants primarily examine transiting planets that have already been discovered to gain more information about their orbit. The time between transits of an exoplanet reveals how long it takes for an exoplanet to orbit its host star; the more transits that are measured, the more precisely the length of the orbit will be known. If the orbit time is not precisely measured, scientists who want to study those planets in more detail using large ground-based or space-based telescopes may lose valuable observing time while waiting for the planet to appear. Having volunteers sort the data will save a lot of computing and processing time.
Exoplanet Watching participants will also look for variations in the apparent brightness of stars, which are changes caused by features such as flares (bursts of light) and starspots (dark spots on a star’s surface). In transit measurements, these changes make a planet appear smaller or larger than it really is. This work will help scientists anticipate the variability of a particular star before studying its exoplanets with large, sensitive telescopes like NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.
Help with your own telescope
Do you want to get your own data? Although the number of targets you can see increases with the size of the telescope you use, there is no minimum size requirement. For example, Exoplanet Watch can help you detect exoplanet transits in hundreds of nearby stars with as little as a 6-inch telescope.
Exoplanet Observation combines observations of the same target by different skygazers to obtain a higher fidelity measurement. Combining observations is also useful if the planet’s transit lasts longer than the time a star is visible in the sky to a single observer: different participants in different parts of the world can collectively observe the duration of a long transit.
That’s what happened to a planet called HD 80606 b, which Webb will observe this year. A recent study of this planet led by Kyle Pearson, deputy chief scientist for Exoplanet Observation at JPL, combined observations from more than 20 participants in this program.
Citizen scientist Bryan E. Martin uses his personal telescope to observe transiting exoplanets with NASA’s Learning Universe: Exoplanet Observation. You don’t need a minimum size telescope to participate, and even those without a telescope can analyze the exoplanet transit data.
Credit: Bryan E. Martin
The efforts of the volunteers with HD 80606 b will free up nearly two hours of time at the Webb telescope for further observations. And on missions that aim to observe hundreds or thousands of exoplanets, the number of minutes saved by refining planetary transit measurements can add up and free up a significant amount of observing time, according to Zellem.
One of the program’s policies requires that the first scientific paper to make use of observations or analysis by volunteers include those volunteers as co-authors, as was the case with the study led by Pearson. “I hope this program lowers the barriers to science for many people and inspires a new generation of astronomers to join our field,” Zellem said.
More about the project
Exoplanet Watching is a citizen science project managed by JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, as part of NASA’s Learning Universe program.
Ground data for the project was collected by the Microobservatory Robotic Telescope Network, supported by NASA’s Learning Universe and managed by the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The data generated by the volunteers is uploaded to the exoplanet database of the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO).
The NASA Learning Universe is a competitively selected program that is part of the NASA Science Activation Network. The Science Activation program connects NASA science experts and real-life content and experiences with community leaders to do scientific research in a way that activates minds and promotes a deeper understanding of our world and beyond.
This work is supported by NASA under award number NNX16AC65A to the Space Telescope Science Institute, in association with Caltech/IPAC, the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and JPL.
For more information on Exoplanet Watch, visit the website: https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/exoplanet-watch/
For more information on NASA’s Universe of Learning, visit the website: https://www.universe-of-learning.org/
For more NASA citizen science projects, visit the website: https://science.nasa.gov/citizenscience
Read this story in English here.