[Flaka]

**September 20, 2011**

Two new planets with a potential to be habitable may have been discovered at the of a Planet Hunters online citizen science project, Yale University reported.

Scientists at Yale University launched an online experiment where they crowd sourced 40,000 web users from all over the world. The users helped astronauts and scientists analyze data from NASA's Kepler mission to see if the light from 150,000 stars gives evidence towards a potential discovery of earth-like planets.

The Keplet mission has been searching for exoplanets since March 2009. Recently NASA's Kepler spacecraft discovered a new planet.

According to scientists the planet named Kepler-19c, makes itself known by the way it influences other planets. The "invisible" planet has tugged at the Kepler-19b, slowing it down and then speeding it up in its transition.

It's like having someone play a prank on you by ringing your doorbell and running away. You know someone was there, even if you don't see them when you get outside," said astronomer Sarah Ballard of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Kepler locates planets by looking for a star that dims slightly as a planet transits the star, passing across the star's face from our point of view. Transits give one crucial piece of information - the planet's physical size. The greater the dip in light, the larger the planet relative to its star. However, the planet and star must line up exactly for us to see a transit.

The data, which is the first of NASA's used by the public was analyzed by the Planer Hunters online experiment and has led to the discovery of two exoplanets a new study to be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the Edhat New Haven reported.

While NASA's Kepler spacecraft is one of the most powerful tools in the hunt for extra solar planets, Planet Hunters bets there will be planets, which can only be found "via the remarkable human ability for pattern recognition."

"[Planet Hunters] is a gamble, a bet if you will, on the ability of humans to beat machines just occasionally. It may be that no new planets are found or that computers have the job down to a fine art. And yet, it's just possible that you might be the first to know that a star somewhere out there in the Milky Way has a companion, just as our Sun does. Fancy giving it a try?," the astronomers wrote on their Website.

One of the two candidates could be a rocky, Earth-like planet, although water has not yet been discovered, which means the planet would not be discoverable.

There 95 percent chance or greater that the candidate planets are bona fide planets," the study found.

The Kepler mission has already found 1200 exoplanet candidates and will follow up on the highest potential ones with further analysis. The candidates found by Planet Hunters users for various technical reasons that led them to believe they weren't promising candidates, the Santa Barbara Edhat reported.

http://newyork.ibtimes.com/articles/...et-hunters.htm

[Flaka]

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[kellyhound]

beam me up Scotty.

[**butterflylove**]

^^ me too!