The Planet Hunters website invites users to search for alien worlds. Anyone with a computer and Internet can comb through data from NASA’s Kepler mission, which monitors a region of the Milky Way galaxy looking for planets outside of our solar system.
Welcome to Planet Hunters from The Zooniverse on Vimeo.
Users can participate for free and have a chance to collaborate on a real discovery for science, using the human brain’s ability to recognize patterns to find signs of alien planets from data of the light from stars in a region towards the direction of the constellation Cygnus. Astronomer Kevin Schawinkski describes the Planet Hunters effort as an extension of the highly successful Galaxy Zoo project.
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With Galaxy Zoo, “we’ve linked up over 300 thousand human brains and turned it into a science machine,” said Schawinkski. Planet Hunters invite users to search for alien worlds and possibly find a world, like Earth, out there.