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Message   VRSS    All   Citizen Scientists Just Helped Discover Nearly 8,000 New Eclipsi   July 7, 2025
 3:00 AM  

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Title: Citizen Scientists Just Helped Discover Nearly 8,000 New Eclipsing
Binary Stars

Link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/07/07/0...

"Citizen scientists have successfully located thousands of previously unknown
pairs of 'eclipsing binary' stars," reports the Washington Post, citing a
recent announcement from NASA. The ongoing initiative helps space researchers
hunt for "eclipsing binary" stars, a rare phenomenon in which two stars orbit
one another, periodically blocking each other's light. These star pairs offer
important data to astrophysicists, who consider the many measurable
properties of eclipsing binaries - and the information they bear about the
history of star formation and destruction - as a foundation of the field...
The citizen science project in question, the Eclipsing Binary Patrol,
validates images from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS)
mission. The satellite, launched in 2018, is "exceptionally capable at
detecting varying stars," the researchers write in a preprint paper
describing the initiative. The researchers used machine learning to identify
about 1.2 million potential eclipsing star pairs. Citizen scientists then
validated a subset of about 60,000... manually inspecting hundreds of
thousands of images of eclipse-like events and weeding out actual binaries
from images that tricked the algorithm. "Thankfully," the researchers write,
"to the rescue come volunteers from all walks of life that boost the capacity
of bandwidth-limited professional astronomers many-fold and help tackle the
ever-increasing volume of publicly available astronomical data." Universe
Today describes how they limited the dataset to only stars with a magnitude
brighter than 15, then used a Python tool to generate a massive dataset of
millions of light curves... The outcome of all the work resulted in the
identification of 10,001 eclipsing binary systems. 7,936 of them are new to
science, while the other 2,065 were previously known, but the study provided
updated, more accurate, parameters for their periods, as TESS' dataset
provided better insight. There were also some particularly interesting
systems that could hold new discoveries, including several that had variable
eclipse timings, and plenty that might have a third star, and some that show
a significant dynamic between the star being orbited and the one doing the
orbiting. All of those systems await further research, but there's another,
unspoken factor at play in this data - exoplanets. TESS was originally
designed as an exoplanet hunter, and this kind of large scale AI/human
collaboration of lightcurve analysis is exactly the kind of work that could
potentially produce even more accurate exoplanet catalogues, as evidenced by
some of the work already done in this paper. That seems to be the next step
for this dataset, with Dr. Kostov telling an interviewer "I can't wait to
search them for exoplanets!" Given the data has already been collected, and
the team has already been assembled, it's very likely he'll get his chance
soon.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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