Zooniverse

My group chose to do the project titled "Find Planets Around Stars".  To find new planets, the site has you look at the brightness of stars over time.  When a planet passes in front of a star, there will be a dip in the brightness of the star.  Depending on the distance of the planet from the star, there could be just one dip or many.  When using Zooniverse, we are asked to mark the dips in the star's brightness.  These are called "transits".

You can see the tutorial if you follow this link:  http://www.planethunters.org/tutorial


What I've learned from using Zooniverse is that most stars have planets around them!  Of the 31 stars I did, I found that the vast majority had transits.  Usually there were many transits, not just one.  I suppose we cannot only be ethnocentric or geocentric, we can also be solar-system-centric!  It seems that it is more likely that other stars have planets orbiting them than it is that ours is somehow special!