Скачать или смотреть SpaceNew: Beyond Our Solar System - News Universe 2018 Updated

SpaceNew: Beyond Our Solar System - News Universe 2018 Updated

There are many planets beyond our own, and we know about some of them thanks to the help of citizen scientists. A system of at least five exoplanets has been discovered through a crowdsourcing project called Exoplanet Explorers, part of the online platform Zooniverse, using data from NASA's Kepler space telescope. This is the first multi-planet system discovered entirely through crowdsourcing.

Thousands of citizen scientists got to work on Kepler data in 2017 when Exoplanet Explorers launched. It was featured on a program called Stargazing Live on the Australia Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). On the final night of the three-day program, researchers announced the discovery of a four-planet system. Since then, they have named it K2-138 and determined that it has a fifth planet—and perhaps even a sixth.

That star, K2-138, is just one of at least 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, a spiral galaxy about 100,000 light years across. The stars are arranged in a pinwheel pattern with four major arms, and we live about two-thirds of the way up one of them. Most of the stars host their own planets. More than 3,500 of these extrasolar (or exoplanets) have been confirmed, and thousands more are candidates.