NASA has been allowing what they call "citizen scientists" view photos taken by the Kepler Space Telescope for the last couple of years now hoping that new habitable planet would be discovered dubbing it the Kepler Mission. Citizen scientists are just average people who have a love and respect for space and astronomy. Now reports are coming in that by playing the Kepler Mission's web-based game, Planet Hunters, two new planets were discovered. The findings will be published in an article in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society this week. You can read the full article here if you want to delve deeper.
How does a game offer the ability to discover planets in such a vast space? The way Planet Hunters works is by allowing the players to make use of public data from the Keplar public data and using the Transit Method. Users observe the light emitted by stars over a 30+ day period and are then asked to look for times when the light curve dips in signal. The dip suggests that a possible planet in orbit around the star is moving across the path of the star at the time. It takes roughly 3 hours for the planet to pass across the face of its star which is long enough for hundreds of light measurements, or dips, to be made. The challenge, as a player, is to identify these dips in light intensity over a course of time for a given star. The size of the planet also plays a role. If a planet is very large, the depth of the transit will be larger than that of a smaller planet, as the larger planet would block more light. Thus, we have a planetary discovery! It's like a tamer version of Asteroids.
Seeing how much work goes into this would make it understandable why more scientific research groups are allowing the public to access this type of data and create games out of them. It's allowing for science to further itself in a positive way by tapping into a form of media that is growing larger and larger everyday. Kepler realized this and so did FoldIt. Both were able to use the advantage of having gamers solve some of the most tedious jobs seeing as these research groups just don't have the manpower or the funding to do so on their own.
Now imagine what else can be accomplished if this type of motivation were presented to school students now? It's a shame that it would have to come to this in order for some students to show their full potential but it would show students what they are capable of and to what degree. Present a way to get someone involved by their own merit and they will be hooked. Couple that with text book knowledge and learning and we could see more classroom interaction. This is just the beginning of what can be accomplished.
We may not have paid attention through every minute of physics or science but every gamer loves a good challenge so long as you know how to motivate us. Come on Science, insert that quarter and show us what you got!
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