The search for life on other planets is changing. No longer resigned to seasoned astronomers, anyone can now join the hunt for extraterrestrials in our galactic neighbourhood thanks to the release of a data set from the Lick-Carnegie Exoplanet Survey.
Having spent the past 20 years collating the information from studying stars in our 'immediate solar neighbourhood', the survey is now inviting the public to use its findings to join the race to find new planetary bodies.
Founded in 1996 by internationally-renowned renowned astronomers Steve Vogt, Geoffrey Marcy and Paul Butler, the Lick-Carnegie Exoplanet Survey has catalogued more than 61,000 individual observations of 1,600 stars.
Dr Butler describes the culmination of the survey as: "one of my crowning achievements as an astronomer. It represents a good chunk of my life’s work."
The survey has already been used to discover 114 exoplanets - with 60 located close to Earth's own solar system. The extrasolar planets orbit stars that can be mapped depending on movement and colour variation. Using the Keck-I telescope, astronomers measured small changes in the target stars' colours, indirectly revealing the existence of the planets.
In particular, they detected the signatures of planets using a technique involving spectral and stellar absorption lines. Stellar lines move very slightly in response to orbiting bodies like planets, but spectral iodine lines are stationary, providing astronomers with a precise reference point.
These reference points are now available for anyone to map using open-source software Systematic 2 Console. This free download lets you input data, map exoplanets into the known collection of discovered bodies, and cross-reference and compile new data with each input.
Making the Keck-I data publicly available also means anyone can verify the Survey's results by re-analysing the data and seeing the planets' signals themselves. As well as providing this software, the Exoplanet Survey has released a tutorial that can teach anyone how to map their own astronomical discoveries into the system.
A recent triumph of the crowd-sourced approach to science was seen with the discovery of Proxima b, spotted orbiting the nearest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri. The use of open-source data meant the 'Pale Red Dot' campaign transformed from a single group of astronomers hunting for Proxima b, to enthusiasts across the world searching the skies for the exoplanet. With crowd-sourced science gaining momentum, our understanding of space and our solar system could, in the future, be further developed by the work of the amateur stargazer.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
