Space Forum / Astronomy / January 2007

http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/space/01/15/virtual.astronomy.ap/index.html

"Amateur astronomers pursue next great discovery"

POSTED: 10:36 a.m. EST, January 15, 2007

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Amateur astronomer William Bianco doesn't
huddle over a backyard telescope to hunt for undiscovered planets. He logs
onto his computer.

Bianco, who was mesmerized by the intricacies of the universe as a young
boy, is part of a growing online community that sifts through mountains of
data collected by professional scientists in search of other worlds.

While Bianco has yet to make a landmark discovery, he savors the rush of
teetering on the cutting edge of research.

Never before have amateur astronomers had so much unfettered access to
celestial data once available only to scientists with huge telescopes.

In the latest frontier of astronomy, professionals are increasingly
enlisting the aid of novices with personal computers to help pore through
images and data -- all in pursuit of the next greaamateur astronomers had so
much unfettered access to celestial data once available only to scientists
with huge telescopes -- -- all in pursuit of the next great breakthrough.

"We're in the golden age of astronomy," said Bianco, who keeps his day job
as a political science professor at Indiana University.

Thanks to technology, novices are effectively turning from lonely
skywatchers to research assistants. Even before the rise of virtual
astronomy, amateurs did everything from tracking asteroids to detecting
supernova explosions to eyeing new comets.

In 1995, neophyte stargazer Thomas Bopp gained fame for co-discovering what
would be known as Comet Hale-Bopp. Two years ago, in what was billed as the
first such find by an amateur in 65 years, Jay McNeil of Kentucky took a
picture of a new nebula -- an illuminated cloud of gas and dust lit by what
is believed to be a newborn star.

Since the late 1990s, virtual astronomy has boomed. One of the earliest
online citizen scientist projects was SETI(at)home, which distributed
software that created a virtual supercomputer by harnessing idle,
Web-connected PCs to search for alien radio transmissions.

While the SETI project hums in the background as a screen saver, the newer
efforts require more human thought.

Bianco belongs to an Internet project called Systemic, which boasts 750
amateur planet hunters. Astronomers have already discovered more than 200
planets in far-off solar systems using traditional methods, yet there are
likely more out there.

Participants download software and rifle through data that measure the tiny
gravitational wobble in a star's motions in search planets that orbit stars
other than our sun. Users also try to decode simulated data of planetary
systems invented by the project managers -- a task that will help the
professionals better understand real extrasolar planets.

To participate, users select a star -- real or simulated -- and adjust other
variables such a planet's mass and orbital period by moving a slider back
and forth on the screen. The goal is to design a planetary system that best
fits the data and then publish the answer online.

So far, online users have pinpointed hundreds of potential candidates, but
only about five might actually be real, said Systemic project head Greg
Laughlin, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

"It's not an aimless game," he said.

Although the Systemic Web site provides the search tools, it doesn't promote
any of the discoveries, Laughlin said. Amateurs who want to publicize their
find need to look for another outlet, such as a scientific journal to get
credit.

Laughlin is no stranger to Web-based astronomy. He helped start another
project in which amateurs point their telescopes at potential extrasolar
planetary systems and look at dimming starlight to learn about a planet's
size and composition. Unlike Systemic, users have to buy expensive
equipment -- including telescopes and cameras -- to participate.

Before Internet-based astronomy, it took a long time for novices to report
their discoveries. High-speed, always-on Internet access has blurred the
line between the professionals and amateurs, said Terry Mann, president of
the Astronomical League, made up of over 240 U.S. amateur astronomy clubs.

Last year, Mann signed up to analyze a repository of online images of the
first-ever microscopic grains of star dust brought back to Earth by a NASA
spacecraft.

The work is painstaking. Mann and her fellow 25,000 volunteers eye hundreds
of thousands of digital images in search of minuscule carrot-shaped trails
left by the capture of star dust, believed to be the leftovers from stellar
explosions.

Mann has submitted 40 possible examples of star dust in the images. If
correct, amateurs can get their names published in scientific papers written
by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, which manages the
Stardust(at)home project.

"Amateurs can do real science. We can actually help," Mann said.

Andrew Westphal, associate director of the Space Sciences Laboratory at
Berkeley, praised amateurs -- it would probably take his whole life to find
all the dust sprinklings, he said.

"It's stunning how good they are. I think they're better at this than we
are," Westphal said.

The Internet has also benefited professional astronomers, who often have to
fight for scarce telescope time at major research observatories.

Since 2001, the National Science Foundation has funded a $10 million project
to create a "national virtual observatory" that compiles data from ground
and space-based telescopes -- including dazzling images from the Hubble
Space Telescope and X-ray data from the Chandra Observatory.

The project, which is still under development, is primarily used by
professionals who want to go to one source to mine archival images. High
school and college students are increasingly tapping into the Web site as
well, said project manager Robert Hanisch of the Space Telescope Science
Institute.

As far as amateur astronomer Bianco is concerned, the more people teasing
out the mysteries of the cosmos, the better.

"It's going to take some time and collective effort to find what's out
there," he said.