BBC Show Stargazing Live Leads To Exoplanet Discovery 66
arnodf writes "Tonight BBC's show stargazing live ended after three days of live astronomy with comedian Dara Ó Briain and professor Brian Cox.
Throughout the show they were trying to make the viewers help in finding an exoplanet via Zooniverse. Thanks to the program they managed to get 1,084,760 classifications in 48 hours and two volunteers discovered an exoplanet which now bears their name.
From the planethunters website: 'Thanks to your help and BBC Stargazing, we managed 1,084,760 classifications in 48 hours.
There's still more to do, and more discoveries to be made, so keep clicking!'"
I didn't know you could name them... (Score:3, Interesting)
I thought that the names had to be approved by the IAU or something. (The summary says the planet found "now bears their name". Unless the IAU decided to name it after them I suspect they got to name it). Is the summary wrong?
On the other hand, if the summary is correct, the chance for OFFICIALLY naming an entire world would be worth something! Who knows, maybe the exo-planet you named after yourself (or your firstborn, or your pet dog) could one day be determined to have life, maybe intelligent life! (Or maybe it'll just have cool double-sun sunsets or pretty rings).
Couldn't NASA get a bit of funding from people who wanted to bid on the rights to name a world? (Unlike copyrights, aren't celestial bodies named FOREVER?).
Re:Bah (Score:4, Interesting)
Why the cynicism? The PlanetHunters site wasn't set up specifically for the show, it was a "citizen science" project running independently (and still is). Users of the site apparently tripled and worked on over a million images in 24 hours which is a pretty awesome amount of help from a three-night show, although I can't find a mention of what is "normal" traffic for the site.
Besides, the show is over now, it was only on for three nights, so there are no more ratings to drive up.
The Beeb have done this sort of thing before: as far as I remember during a documentary on climate changed they encouraged viewers to get involved with a BOINC weather analysis project. The difference there is that BOINC projects don't involve people actively examining the data themselves and it's very hard to separate out individual contributions.