Sifting of all the data by astronomers is done over three years by K2 mission i.e. 287,309 stars have been detected and tens of thousands more roll in every few months. UC Santa Cruz astronomer Ian Crossfield and Caltech staff scientist Jessie Christiansen developed the Exoplanet Explorers citizen scientist project which was hosted on Zooniverse, an online platform for crowdsourcing research.
From exoplanets people from anywhere can log on and learn what are real signals and then can look through the actual data gathered from the Kepler Telescope for voting whether or not to classify a given signal as a noise or just by noise. They have potential transit signal looked at by minimum of 10 people and the resulted requirement was 90 percent yes votes for further categorization.
When Exoplanet Explorers was set up on Zooniverse, two weeks after their initial prototype they were featured in a three-day event on the ABC Australian Network television and during their first 48 hours after the project was introduced, more than 10,000 users searched and received over 2 million classifications. The search included a brand new dataset from the K2 mission, whereas the reincarnation of the primary Kepler mission ended three years ago and it included a whole new field of view and crop stars required for searching planets.
The dataset C12 was not even looked by any professional astronomer and later they both researchers joined NASA for further examining of results and using depth of the transits curve and the periodicity with which it appears. Further the demographics of the planet were discussed which included 44 jupiter sized planets, 72 Neptune-sized, 44 Earth sized and 53 so-called Super Earth’s but smaller than Neptune.
The researchers were trying to find something extraordinary even before the launch night so, originally combined through the planet candidates to find a planet habitable zone, a region around the star where liquid water exists. They took a look on multi-planet system as that will take a while to validate and further ensured it was really a red planet and not a false alarm because they were having problem and getting themselves in accidents related to several planets.
They sorted out the data of crowdsourced data for finding out the star with multiple transits along with the discovery of star with four planets orbiting around it. Over 10 people appreciated and agreed yes whereas remaining one have 92 percent yes.
Further many more research and discoveries were identified by them and explained with full details to the interested users forming new theories related for related study.
