The explosion of a star is discovered thanks to the participation of simple citizens engaged in a ‘cosmic’ enigmistic game: it is a new success of the so -called Citizen Science, in a project that has seen the involvement of 3500 people who have analyzed almost 3 million images over time. A work coordinated by Tom KilleStein, of the British University of Warwick, and Lisa Kelsey, of the University of Cambridge, which led to a publication in the Astronomy and Astrophysics magazine.
Remember the enigmistic game ‘Find the differences’ but in this case it is on a cosmic scale: it is Kilonova Seekers, an app that asks the public to find the differences between two images of small portions of the night sky but taken after a few days. “Kilonova Seekers represents a unique opportunity for the public to try their hand at astrophysics,” said Killetein. In fact, the system allows you to analyze thousands of photos a day to really give help to dispose of part of the long analysis work that would otherwise be impossible given the large amount of information coming every day from telescopes. In this case, some participants, just 3 and a half hours from the shots, have identified the presence of a new ends of light called Goto0650, a so -called variable cataclysmal star, that is, pairs of stars in which one of the two, usually a white dwarf, tears matter from the other.
A periodic phenomenon that creates violent explosions. The rapid recognition of these phenomena can allow, as in this case, to activate a sort of urgent notice for other types of telescopes so as to concentrate the observations on the explosion in progress and better understand these violent cosmic phenomena. “With over 2.8 million classifications so far-said Kelsey-the discovery of Goto0650 really represents the apex of two years of hard constant work by our volunteers. Without the volunteers of Kilonova Seekers who reported this object, it would not have been possible to have a quick follow-up and this object may have been completely ignored”.
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