Television is wedding shows, dating shows and food shows, right? In what must be a historic first, ABC's Stargazing Live have looked higher and discovered a new solar system.
The four new planets orbiting a yellow "parent" star were found by more than 10,000 amateur astronomers from all around Australia who logged on to the show online and helped analyse the data that identified the new solar system.
The discovery was made using data from NASA's Kepler space telescope; help came from scientists from the University of California Santa Cruz, Caltech, a Californian space thinktank, and Zooniverse, an online citizen-science project. The show's viewers were called on to hunt exoplanets (beyond our solar system) by analysing observations of about 100,000 stars via the Zooniverse website and recently downloaded data from the NASA telescope.
"The discovery of such an unusual system, with four planets crammed together, will help us test our ideas about how planets are made," said Professor Chris Lintott, a professor of Astrophysics at Oxford, "a question which has profound implications for understanding the history of our own Earth."
World: hey what you doing?Australia: just discovering new planets on live TV - you?World: 😱😱😱#StargazingABC @RiAus
— Alicia WanstallBurke (@alicia_j_burke) April 6, 2017
Yup, @the_zooniverse volunteers discovered a 4 planet exo-solar system! #stargazingabc #stargazinglive https://t.co/hUnQUhB3FC pic.twitter.com/3hBNRBrJln
— Becky Smethurst (@becky1505) April 6, 2017
The newly discovered system is in the constellation of Aquarius and is 600-light years away. The planets are each double the size of Earth.
Stargazing Live is a BBC idea that is now screening and holding live events in Australia with British professor Brian Cox and TV personality Julia Zemiro. Professor Cox said in the seven years he had hosted the show in the UK " this is the most significant scientific discovery we've made. The results are a wonderful and intriguing surprise."
While the method of discovery was notable, experts played down expectations that this discovery would be a major astronomical breakthrough.
"These sorts of exoplanet discoveries are as common as dirt nowadays," said Professor Chris Tinney, head of exoplanetary science at the University of NSW.
"It's another multiplanetary system to add to the many hundred we have found in the Kepler data."
Professor Tinney said most of the multi-planetary systems found in these data was of planets close to their host star, similar to the discovery announced on the ABC Stargazing live program.
"There are a lot of these citizen science projects where people can look through data for signs of exoplanets. I'd say well done and good luck to the person who found this data before anyone else did."
More information: exoplanetexplorers.org
- with Marcus Strom