In a fast-paced three-day study, funded through crowdsourcing, a team of astronomers searched for traces of our solar system's mysterious Ninth Planet and surprisingly found four suitable candidates for the role.
The "hunt" for the Ninth Planet was carried out within the framework of the civil science project Zooniverse. Moreover, all scientific work was carried out and broadcast in real time using the BBC Stargazing Live service. The project itself took place within the walls of the Siding Spring Observatory, owned by the Australian National University (ANU).
In total, more than 60,000 people from all over the world took part in the study. Ultimately, the work not only identified four potential candidates for the role of Planet Nine, but also helped to classify more than four million other objects in space within our solar system. For their work, the project participants used data obtained from the Siding Spring Observatory SkyMapper telescope.
Researcher Brad Tucker of the Australian National University led the project. Interestingly, the research team agreed to any validation of the value of this study by other scientific groups in case it turns out that one of these four candidates will be accepted as the very Ninth Planet that the entire astronomical community has been talking about for a year.
Another interesting point to note is that Mike Brown of Caltech was among the scientists who supported the ANU researchers' mindset.
“I just wanted to say that you guys are really cool. We're just going crazy here if you really find her,”Brown wrote on his Twitter page, referring to Brad Tucker.
In 2016, Brown and his colleague Konstantin Batygin discovered that the orbits of several different Kuiper Belt objects were gravitated by a massive body. This was the first indirect evidence that in our system, far beyond Pluto's orbit, there may be a very large, Neptune-sized, previously unseen planet. However, the actual search and observation of her is hampered by a number of factors. And one of those factors is that this object could be a thousand times fainter than Pluto. Therefore, the next task for the researchers was to get acquainted with the old and already collected data and make new observations.
As a result, the crowdsourcing project came to the following:
Promotional video:
“With the help of tens of thousands of independent volunteers who analyzed hundreds of thousands of images from the SkyMapper telescope, we were able to complete a four-year survey in just three days,” says Tucker.
"One of these volunteers, Toby Roberts, conducted 12,000 different classifications!"
The ANU team will continue their research and try to confirm whether one of the four objects they have selected is actually Planet Nine. At the same time, they ask people to continue to follow the Zooniverse project and, if not financially, then morally support the researchers. All in all, this "experiment" proves that so many things can be achieved if you can bring many scientists (and just people who love science) together.
New technologies like deep learning and tools like the James Webb Space Telescope can make such research very simple and fast, but now, if you want to come up with quick results, you need to involve everyone who cares.
NIKOLAY KHIZHNYAK