Planet Hunters Finds Extrasolar Planets Via Crowdsourced Effort

- Planet Hunters: The First Two Planet Candidates Identified by the Public using the Kepler Public Archive Data, MNRAS
- From the Comfort of Home, Web Users May Have Found New Planets, Yale University

Think about this: One would think that with this announcement - one that comes on the heels of the Tatooine discovery last week - that the Kepler team would be working overtime on a way to throw more of its data out - sooner - such that they can harness the crowd-sourced power of interested citizens motivated to make a contribution to the discovery of worlds circling other stars. Not only does this help in times of limited budgets, it allows the citizenry a chance to truly participate in their space agency's exploration of the universe - and therein transform that formerly distant, lofty activity into a personal one. When things get personal, people tend to want to stand up and fight for those things.