Want to discover a planet? All you need is
an Internet connection
  By ALICIA CHANG..BR.EAAP Science
Writer
  LOS ANGELES -- 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 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 codiscovering 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 Mcationeil 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@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 to search for 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 as 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@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 &036bbaj 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.
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