After more than four years of observations with the Kepler Space Telescope, astronomers reveal that a bizarre star called KIC 8462852 has unexplained objects orbiting it.
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Anyone can become a scientific researcher. Zooniverse, the world’s largest citizen-based science research company, recruits hundreds of thousands of people to become citizen scientists and researchers who investigate and analyze many topics across the sciences and humanities. Available topics for study include astronomy, zoology, history, archaeology, botany and much more. Volunteers help professional researchers collect and organize information, and provide measurable results for scientific study.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Wendy Stenzel
A recent example comes from Planet Hunters, an arm launched by Zooniverse in 2010 to enlist public help with data collected by NASA from the Kepler space telescope. CNN reports Oct.
16 that citizen researchers helped to make a recent significant find. The researchers used publicly available data from Kepler and found strange light fluctuations that pointed to the existence of a massive cloud of dust and debris orbiting the faraway star KIC 8462852.
Like many projects found on the Zooniverse site, an incredible amount of data is collected and then analyzed by algorithms. The process lacks “the human touch,” however, and doesn’t necessarily pinpoint details that are out of the ordinary, such as the patterns of dimmed light that citizen researchers found when checking out data from the Kepler space telescope.
Other projects on the Zooniverse site include the exploration of soldiers’ diaries from the First World War, identifying bat calls, the traits of chimpanzees, or differentiating individual humpback whales from others. Researchers can transcribe historical documents, help scientists define the planetary surfaces of Mars, and even help discover unknown exotic particles.
With the help of citizen scientists and researchers, professionals have composed numerous publications which summarize researchers’ collective finds. To find out how to become a researcher for one of the numerous projects at Zooniverse, visit the organization’s website and choose a project to get started.
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