How a Guy Found 4 New Planets Without a Telescope 133
An anonymous reader writes "Peter Jalowiczor is a gas worker from South Yorkshire, England. He's also the discoverer of four giant exoplanets, according to the University of California's Lick-Carnegie Planet Search Team. But he's not an astronomer and he doesn't even have a telescope. '...in 2005, astronomers at the university released millions of space measurements collected over several decades and asked enthusiasts to make of them what they would. ... From March 2007 Peter, 45, spent entire nights reading the data, working the figures, creating graphs. ... He then sent discrepancies he discovered back to the scientists in California where they were further analyzed to see if the quirks were caused by the existence of an exoplanet.'"
Not "without a telescope". (Score:5, Informative)
He's been using "other people's telescopes" so to speak.
This is nothing new -- in fact, most astronomers work just like him - they use observations made by their colleagues.
The astronomers who actually do observations are fewer than the people who do astronomy, mostly because observing requires a whole lot of skills on top of astronomy knowledge.
Re:Bravo (Score:5, Informative)
Point is, a lot of the bigger telescopes provide far more data than can be handled by dedicated computing. This has been the case since CCDs were invented decades ago, there's just too much to analyse everything within the budget, so they go for the obvious/important/cheap signals (delete as applicable).
SETI started distributed computing in a big way, and this is a similar (if far more individually clever) application. It's very muck akin to the way volunteers sometimes sift through spoil on an archaeological dig just in case anything interesting has been missed by the JCBs and WHSs. Good on the guy, it's a fair old achievement and a hobby I aspire to matching.