For centuries, scientific research was conducted almost exclusively by an elite few. Hidden away from the general public, determined individuals spent their entire lives looking up telescopes or down microscopes, observing and calculating in an attempt to understand our mysterious universe.
Ordinary men and women were kept mostly in the dark about such experiments, until some major discovery was made – and suddenly the scientists would get chatty. But now a new age is dawning for scientific research. And it involves everyone.
‘Citizen science’ is the term used to describe a revolutionary new way of analysing data. The premise is simple: get lots and lots of people to look at something, and a few of them are bound to spot something special. Advances in technology mean that, especially in fields like astronomy, huge volumes of experimental data can be gathered at a phenomenal rate, but the computing power available to analyse it all doesn’t match up.
Meanwhile, across the globe, millions of people are online, looking for ways to spend their time. Ordinary people who, regardless of their scientific background, have that magnificent skill that computers can’t master – pattern recognition. As it turns out, this human capability, of finding order out of chaos, noticing signals that are just a little bit unusual, suits an extraordinarily large number of scientific projects; from classifying bat calls to searching images of tissues for cancer cells.
Planet Hunters is one such project and its business is booming. Initially set up at Yale University in 2010, there are now over 200,000 people from all over the world involved in the project. Volunteers are asked to take a look at the ‘light curves’ of the thousands of stars recorded by the Kepler satellite telescope, and search for the dips or changes in intensity that are the tell-tale signs of orbiting exoplanets. After enough people have flared up a particular star, the Planet Hunters team take another look at it with the Keck telescope in Hawaii, and try to make further measurements of quantities like velocity and mass of the possible planet, in order to figure out what’s going on.
The citizen science approach suited this kind of research perfectly and the team’s first major success came just a few months ago. In October 2012, the planet hunters discovered their very first exoplanet. Named PH1, after the project, the individual volunteers who first spotted the unusual light signal were even made co-authors of the paper, submitted to the Astrophysical Journal, which detailed its discovery. Three more research papers have also been submitted that detail the overall success on the project. 2013 has brought yet more data, better software, and new possibilities of discovery for the team. “But the entire goal, let’s be clear, of looking for exoplanets, is not finding exoplanets,” says Debra Fischer, a founder of the Planet Hunters project. “We want to find life.”
What makes projects like these so successful is not just the amazing processing power of human collaboration. They are also, by their very nature, outreach projects. Ordinary people with perhaps no scientific background are becoming involved, educated, and above all, excited, by some tiny aspect of all that science has to offer, be it the light from stars or the details of the ocean floor. Anyone can be a citizen scientist. These projects let people know, science is not just for men in laboratories – it’s for everyone.
IMAGE: Haven Giguere and Yale