Gaseous Planets Orbiting Bright Star Discovered: Citizen Scientists Finds Exoplanets With Sizes Like Neptune and Saturn

An otherworldly discovery has just been reported after a pair of gaseous planets was discovered orbiting the HD 152843 bright star.

SciTechDaily reported the planets were detected through the Planet Hunters TESS, a citizen science project in collaboration with professional scientists.

At night, Miguel, a seven-year-old boy likes talking to his father Cesar Rubio, a machinist in Pomona, California, about stars and planets. Rubio is making parts for mining and power generation equipment.

Now, this boy can proudly claim his father helped in the discovery of planets, too, after the machinist became one of the thousands of volunteers who participated in Planet Hunters TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), a citizen science project funded by NASA that's searching for evidence of planets outside the solar system, also known as exoplanets.

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Citizen Science

Citizen science is an initiative for members of the public to work together with scientists. Over 29,000 people all over the world have joined the Planet Hunters TESS effort to help scientists discover exoplanets.

Now, Planet Hunters TESS has announced the finding of the two exoplanets in the article, Planet Hunters TESS III: two transiting planets around the bright G dwarf HD 152843, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. It details the participation of TESS volunteers, including Rubio and over a dozen other citizen scientists on the list of co-authors in the science article.

Such exotic worlds orbit a bright star known as HD 152843, located at roughly 352 light-years away. This particular star is roughly the same mass as the Sun, although nearly 1.5 times larger and a bit brighter.

Planet b and Planet c

A similar Phys.org report said Planet b, roughly similar to the size of Neptune, is approximately 3.4 times larger than Earth and completes an orbit in about 12 days around its star.

Planet c, on the other hand, the outer planet, is roughly 5.8 times larger than Earth, making it a sub-Saturn. Its orbital period is somewhere between 19 and 35 days.

In Earth's solar system, both of these exoplanets would be well within Mercury's orbit, which is approximately 88 days.

According to Nora Eisner, a doctoral student in astrophysics at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and the study's lead author, studying the two exoplanets together, both of them at the same time, is significant for theories on the manner planets are forming and evolving over time.

The TESS Initiative

The TESS satellite was launched by NASA in 2018. The TESS team used data from the satellite for the identification of over 100 exoplanets and more than 2,600 candidates waiting for confirmation.

Planet Hunters TESS is operated by means of the Zooniverse website started in December 2018 shortly after the initial TESS data became available to the public. Volunteers look at graphs displaying the brightness of different stars over time.

They note which of such plots are showing a brief dip in the brightness of the star, and then an ascending swing to the original level.

This can take place when a planet crosses the star's face, blocking out a little bit of light, an occurrence known as a transit.

The 'Planet Hunters' Project

The Planet Hunters project is sharing each brightness plot also known as a light curve involving 15 volunteers. In the website's background, an algorithm gathers all of the submissions of the volunteers and picks out light curves flagged by multiple volunteers.

Eisner and her colleagues then looked at the highest-ranked light curves and identify which ones would be ideal for scientific follow-up.

Even in a period of sophisticated calculating like machine-learning, having a big group of volunteers who look through telescope data is quite a big help to scientists.

Since scientists cannot perfectly train computers to determine the signatures of potential planets, the human eye remains valuable. This is the reason a lot of exoplanet candidates are missed, and the reason citizen science is a great asset, explained Eisner.

In the case of this bright star, citizen scientists look at a plot exhibiting its brightness during the TESS observations' one-month period.

Related information is shown on Inshorts - Space's YouTube video below: