Ever thought about how ancient people found all the planets in our solar system. Gone are those days when people gazed up at "wandering stars" later observers called them as planets. Now, astronomers are armed with radio telescopes, orbital observatories and many more hi-tech tools.
Before getting into planet hunting, our discussion starts with full of questions like Why? What? Where? How?
WHY WE ARE HUNTING PLANETS?
From the beginning stage of the universe it's expanding day by day by creating new stars and planets. In some words we can say it as mass of the universe is increasing. So there is a chance of new planets formation.
WHAT MAKES US TO FIND PLANETS?
To find life. Yes, it's the unique reason what is making us to find planets. Every solar system have a habitual zone. Just think about our solar system, we are having a sun and there are planets around it. Mercury and Venus comes under hot zones and on the other side Jupiter, Neptune, and Saturn comes under cold zones. Earth and Mars comes under habitual zones. This is also another reason for searching life on Mars.
PLANET HUNTERS
Planet hunters is a mission to find planets using human eyes. Users analyse data from the kepler space telescope. The reason why NASA is using humans for planet hunting is we are best a recognizing patterns. Though we have computers with artificial intelligence we have to provide patterns at prior so, it is not possible as the light in space can have different patterns.
https://www.planethunters.org
The above link is NASA planet hunters website. After logging in to the site we can see some images of data collected by NASA kepler mission and we have to look at the data and see how the brightness of a star changes over time. Star's brightness data is represented as a graph and referred to a star's light curve. Those curves helps us in discovering new planets with the brightness of light decreasing when a planet pass through in front of it.
DISCOVERIES
Over 12 billion observations have been analyzed. Out of those, 32 planets have possibility of life in them.
