Researchers call for armchair astronomers to help find unknown hidden worlds

Astronomers at the University of Warwick have joined partners around the world in launching a new online initiative, calling for volunteers to come forward and help to search for extrasolar planets. The online citizen project, Planet Hunters Next-Generation Transit Search (NGTS), is enlisting the help of the public to examine five years' worth of digital footage showing some of the brightest stars in the sky. The footage was captured by twelve NGTS robotic telescopes based at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) Paranal Observatory in Chile - they make high precision measurements, sensitive enough to detect the signatures of exoplanets. NGTS is a collaboration between the University of Warwick, Queen's University Belfast, University of Cambridge, University of Leicester, Geneva Observatory, German Aerospace Center, Universidad de Chile, the Universidad Católica del Norte, and the European Southern Observatory. Professor Peter Wheatley from the Astronomy and Astrophysics Group at University of Warwick leads NGTS. He said: "It is exciting to be able to involve the public in our search for planets around other stars. We control the NGTS telescopes from the University of Warwick, and we process all the data here, but we are pretty sure our computer programs are missing some planets.