Journey 'hunt' candidate for the 9th planet

After the search process, the online community has strongly contributed to the program to find an undiscovered planet in our Solar System and nominated 4 candidates.

The ninth planet hunt is part of the "Zooniverse citizen" science project, a reality television show that is live on the BBC. The project was held at the Australian National Siding Spring Observatory (ANU).

The community has joined hands to analyze huge volumes of data.

About 60,000 people from all over the world participate in the search, resulting in not only turning up 4 candidates but also helping to classify more than 4 million others.

Participants used data from the SkyMapper Siding Spring telescope . The project was led by Brad Tucker - a graduate student at ANU and all participants agreed that, even if one of the four nominations cannot become the ninth planet, the scientific value of the project is unquestionable.

After Pluto is removed from the list, the Solar System has only 8 planets left.

In 2016, astronomers discovered that the trajectory of several different objects in the Kuiper belt was affected by a massive planet. This is indirect proof that a large planet equivalent to Neptune is existing in our Solar System and the size far exceeds Pluto.

However, the search for mysterious planets poses significant challenges. First, it is more faint than the Pluto. The task for researchers, then, is to screen through old data and serve as a basis for new observations.

"With the help of tens of thousands of dedicated volunteers selected through hundreds of thousands of photos taken by SkyMapper," Tucker said : "We have achieved 4 years of scientific analysis in just three days. One of the volunteers, Toby Roberts, has done more than 12,000 classifications ".

The ANU team will continue to seek and try to confirm whether or not one of the appropriate spatial objects for nomination becomes the ninth planet.

Siding Spring Observatory at AUN.

New technologies such as deep learning and tools such as the James Webb space telescope could one day make this type of research done quickly and easily, but now, the contributions of The community is helping things happen faster.