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Australian National University reports:
Astronomers from The Australian National University (ANU) are investigating four unknown objects that could be candidates for a new planet in our Solar System, following the launch of their planetary search on the BBC's Stargazing Live broadcast from the ANU Siding Spring Observatory.
Lead researcher Dr Brad Tucker said about 60,000 people from around the world had classified over four million objects in space as part of the ANU-led citizen search for the so-called Planet 9.
"We've detected minor planets Chiron and Comacina, which demonstrates the approach we're taking could find Planet 9 if it's there," said Dr Tucker from the ANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics.
...
"We've managed to rule out a planet about the size of Neptune being in about 90 per cent of the southern sky out to a depth of about 350 times the distance the Earth is from the Sun," he said.
takyon: Estimates of Planet Nine's size put it at as little as half the radius of Neptune. The likely colder temperature of such a planet could result in a higher density.
The article mentions 2060 Chiron and 489 Comacina.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday March 31 2017, @11:58PM (2 children)
I looked at a few images on zooniverse.org. Very grainy and noisy. Didn't feel like I had much idea what to look for or what the heck I was doing. Probably marked up a bunch of false positives.
The first time I gave it a try, they were using this flipbook method. You got 4 pictures of the same small piece of sky, taken at different times, and in all the grainy mess littered with dancing stars, you were trying to spot anything that danced differently. What wasn't made too clear was how much time had elapsed between each of the images, and therefore how much movement to expect. A few pixels? A huge jump halfway across the image?
The 2nd time, they'd made a major change. They'd tinted each of the images with a different color and somehow merged them into 1. The result is an image with rectangular areas tinted different colors. You looked for small colored discs that were not in the rectangular area of the matching tint. And the merging got rid of the dancing, which makes it much easier to spot moving objects.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Saturday April 01 2017, @12:16AM
Just seems to be the flip-book thing for me.
I think zooniverse is great (but then I would say that, I got to be on TV a couple of years ago after joint-finding a supernova on it) but their interfaces suck. I've written my own Greasemonkey scripts so I can do everything with the keyboard, as the multiple mouse-clicks and mouse-moves just to move on to the next candidate images slow everything down. If they had a better interface, power users could get much more done.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday April 01 2017, @01:03AM
I remember participating in one of the early zooniverse projects where you classified galaxies. Some of the galaxies had pretty clear imagery with visible dust lanes or spirals. Others were red blobs. But they were distinguishable as galaxies (since pretty much every red object is a galaxy when you go that far out).
With the Planet Nine search, I don't think I saw one dwarf planet or asteroid in any of the 30 sets I looked at. Some series of images were missing frames, and some frames suddenly went negative.
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