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First Citizen Science Successes for Backyard Astronomy by Staff Writers Mountain View CA (SPX) Jun 12, 2020
Citizen science pioneers recently made two contributions to a better knowledge of outer space. Backyard astronomers of the SETI Institute and Unistellar network conducted in April citizen science observations, and their discoveries will improve our understanding of asteroids and exoplanets. Thanks to their work, we know precisely the location of the main-belt asteroid 2000 UD52 and have confirmed an exoplanet transit of Qatar-1b. After receiving an alert from SETI Institute scientists, on the night of April 9, Morand, a partner in a French strategy consulting firm, seized the opportunity to become an early pioneer in citizen science. He quickly set up his eVscope in his backyard in Western France. A few minutes later, he succeeded in detecting an occultation by main-belt asteroid 2000 UD52, which occulted a star that was visible with his eVscope. This observation provides new insights about this celestial object, including an accurate estimate of its location.
Here is how he described his experience: The Citizen Science team is also monitoring transiting events involving Jupiter-size exoplanets. On the night of April 23, Julien, a consulting manager in a Swiss public office, received an alert and tried to detect the Qatar-1b gas giant exoplanet transiting its star. Again, his willingness to contribute to cutting-edge science was rewarded with the resulting light curve proving that a detection was achieved. "It takes me back to my childhood, the day I learned about the discovery of the first exoplanet," said Julien. "I was so excited, and never could I have imagined that it will one day be possible for me to detect an exoplanet myself!" Both results have been submitted and are now stored on scientific data repositories so that astronomers around the world can access them. Euraster, the European Asteroidal Occultations network, published the positive detection of 2000 UD52 on its website. Unistellar network's detections of exoplanet transits have been published by the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO) in partnership with the Exoplanet Watch program.
A New Era in Citizen Science "Enabled by the most revolutionary innovation in amateur astronomy to come along in decades, we are literally crowd-sourcing scientific discovery and cutting-edge astronomy," said Bill Diamond, CEO of the SETI Institute. "The power of citizen science in astronomical observations made possible by the Unistellar eVscope has already demonstrated breakthrough results - and we're only just getting started. As more users join our science team, the future holds unimaginable possibilities." The SETI Institute and Unistellar are working together to increase the network's potential for scientific studies and new discoveries. "18 asteroid occultation campaigns involving 65 backyard astronomers, and 18 transiting exoplanet events, have been reported just since February 2020. Passionate citizen scientists have uploaded more than 1 million data frames on our servers. " said Franck Marchis, Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute and Chief Scientific Officer at Unistellar. "Citizen scientists are pioneers directly contributing to current and future space exploration programs."
Unistellar The Unistellar eVscope received a CES Innovation Award in 2018 in the category Tech for a Better World and has been nominated for a SXSW 2019 Innovation Award. Thousands of digital telescopes have already been ordered, with a thousand already delivered, delighting customers with an unprecedented observing experience.
Ancient micrometeoroids carried specks of stardust, water to asteroid 4 Vesta St. Louis MO (SPX) Jun 10, 2020 The formation of our solar system was a messy affair. Most of the material that existed before its formation - material formed around other, long-dead stars - was vaporized, then recondensed into new materials. But some grains of that material, formed before the sun's birth, still persist. These "stardust" grains arrived on Earth inside primitive meteorites. New Washington University in St. Louis research led by Nan Liu, an assistant research professor in physics and the Laboratory for Space Scien ... read more
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