Astronomers are giving everyone the chance to discover a planet over the internet. They want the public to help in the search for new worlds orbiting distant stars.
Participants do not need a telescope. Instead the project will use a network of home computers to analyse data recorded on 100,000 stars in the galaxy.
Organisers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, got the idea from SETI – the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence which lets you download a screensaver that searches for radio signals from aliens.
The new project, called Systemic, runs through different computer models for target stars to work out what sort of planetary systems best fit the data.
Software is available for download from the website http://oklo.org and the first set of data for analysis will be released next month.
Astronomers have so far used other means to discover nearly 200 extrasolar planets orbiting other stars. But they are mainly giant planets like Jupiter. The California team hope the new project will identify stars with smaller planets like the Earth.
Gregory Laughlin, associate professor of astronomy, said: “How good are we at detecting strange systems? Stars with three planets instead of two? Two instead of one? There are a lot of questions like this that can be addressed with a large-scale simulation.
“We need public participation because the most interesting systems are very hard to decipher. I think it’s realistic because the internet is a global thing. We have users from all over the world.”