Public participation in science is growing, and citizen science has a central part in this. It is a contribution by the public to research, actively undertaken, and requiring thoughtful action. Thousands of enthusiastic volunteer citizen scientists are grabbing the opportunity to help astronomers discover thousands of planets in our solar system and whether any of them could support life. Who doesn’t want to discover new planets? With Exoplanet Explorers, citizen scientists collaborate with scientists and search for exoplanets, the planets around other stars. Here we will discuss more detailed information about the citizen science project Exoplanet Explorers
About Exoplanet Explorers
Exoplanet Explorers is a citizen science project led by astrophysicist Jessie Christiansen who works at the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech. The project is part of Zooniverse. The world’s prominent ‘citizen science’ platform brings together people from all walks of life, from all over the world, to answer our biggest global obstructions. Members of Exoplanet Explorers use data from the Kepler space telescope to continue the search for exoplanets.
The Exoplanet Explorers project, launched on Zooniverse, a popular citizen science platform, has already identified more than 200 candidate planets, including a new four-planet system. Zooniverse has an association of more than 850,000 people, who have become part of more than 20 citizen science projects over the years. The association has grown to over 1.6 million enrolled volunteers working directly with hundreds of researchers throughout the world.
Identifying the new exoplanets provides scientists with a wonderful opportunity to further study the physical characteristics of these planets, such as their atmosphere, density, and chemistry. So help the scientists look through new data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope to find new exoplanets!
How to Get Involved?
While automated systems can discover most planets, human eyes are especially good at detecting exotic planetary systems, like PH1. The extrasolar planet detected in the Kepler-64 star system was discovered by two amateur stargazers from the Planet Hunters. Exoplanet Explorers aims to explore ways of evaluating motivation and improving volunteer engagement with online citizen science projects.
The work will examine the interaction between motivations, behavior, and people’s enjoyment and satisfaction. To do this they need your help! Your participation may help them to discover new planets orbiting other stars in our galaxy. This will help them to realize how to enhance benefits to volunteers, and increase engagement in citizen science, and science in general.
To become a part of the Exoplanet Explorers, you may reach out to them, via the Contact Us page. Besides, To enroll yourself as a volunteer, click on the Projects page, select the appropriate project, and get yourself enrolled!
Don’t Miss Out!
The purpose of citizen science ought to be to offer research and discovery. That is definitely enclosed in its definition as a subset of science. Subject areas of analysis range between space, climate, humanities, nature, and biology, and anyone can contribute to these important areas of research by classifying pictures or data. Genuine collaboration in science is crucial in an era when such a thing is imaginable. We should never waste people’s time. Now that it has been convincingly proved that the public can assist in citizen science projects via the internet, we must keep the bar raised and the standard high.