When two stars are orbit in such a way that one blocks the light of the other each time it oscillates, it is an eclipizing binary. A new paper Eclipsing Binary Patrol Citizen Science Project of NASA presents more than 10,000 of these rare pairs – 10 001 to be precise. These objects will help future researchers to study physics and the training of stars and to seek new exoplanets.
“Together, humans and computers excellent to investigate hundreds of thousands of overshadows,” said Dr. Veselin Kostov, researcher at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and Seti Institute and main author of the newspaper. “I can’t wait to look for exoplanets!”
To create their catalog, the team examined the data from the exoplanet survey satellite in NASA transit (Tess), which studied almost the whole sky in search of objects with variable brightness. They used a two -level approach, combining the scalability of artificial intelligence with the nuanced judgment of human expertise. First, advanced automatic learning methods have effectively revised the hundreds of millions of targets observed by Tess, identifying hundreds of thousands of promising candidates. Then humans examined the most interesting systems.
Of the 10,001 objects they have listed in their article, 7,936 are new overshadowed binaries they have discovered. The others were already known, but the team made new measurements on the calendar of their eclipses.
You can also join the Eclipsing binary patrol team! Just go to Project website.