If you ever wanted to help find new planets, now’s your chance

[smp]

From Ars Technica:
"If you've ever wanted to search for distant worlds, your time has come. The team behind a planet-hunting telescope array called the Next-Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) is looking for help with the large volume of data the instrument has produced. The NGTS scans large areas of the sky with a collection of small, robotic telescopes to detect dips in stars' light that are caused by a planet passing between the stars and Earth.

The team now has a lot of data, which it has sifted through using computers. But computers have difficulty distinguishing a likely planet from various sources of noise, so the researchers are asking the public to double-check the computers and provide a final call on what a signal is."

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10 ... et-hunter/

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[Lariliss]

Nice call! Thank you.

My position came recently, that for any targeted mission, all the collected data should be shared to several parallel undergoing ones. And exoplanets search is a key one of them.

Habitable zones and conditions of a planet should go with all the approaches, including ‘Earth-like’ stable systems, gas giants, ice, etcetera.
AI recognition is powerful for sure. But in order to be effective, the data processing needs dedicated supercomputers, money and power consumption, hence environment pollution.
Any AI needs babysitting, not exactly for tasks like this, but the human eye can be more sharp.

It is really great to have this public opportunity and great news for astronomers.