You don't need to be a professional astronomer to make exciting new astronomic discoveries. In fact you don't even need to know very much about astronomy at all. Over the past few years some amazing discoveries have been made by 'citizen scientists', people with no professional training.
Professional telescope observing programmes are continually producing millions of exquisitely detailed images of the night sky. For example, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey is dedicated to observing every detail of a particular patch of sky, with the intention of mapping it and discovering interesting new objects.
That's an admirable goal - but each image has to be looked at individually to see if in contains anything worth following up, a mammoth task with such a massive amount of data. Computer programmes can help to some extent, but are of limited use in spotting unusual things.
Observation skills
Not so with humans, who are very good at picking out oddities – and that's where volunteer 'citizen scientists' come in. Projects like Galaxy Zoo, Planet Hunters and Space Warp have uploaded millions of images and other data to the internet, and volunteers like you or me, after taking a short online tutorial about what to look for, are then able to view and classify images and highlight anything unusual .The volunteers may not be professional astronomers, but with thousands of people looking out for something out of the ordinary, some very interesting scientific discoveries have resulted from their efforts.
For example, the green object in the image above is something that had never ever been seen before. It has been nicknamed 'Hanny's Voorwerp', after the Galaxy Zoo volunteer who spotted it. It's massive, as large as our galaxy, and is believed to be gas and dust set aglow by a quasar, which has ionised the oxygen atoms in it.
Distorted light
On a larger scale, a few months ago the 'Space Warps' project announced the discovery by citizen scientists of 29 previously unknown possible gravitational lenses. A gravitational lens is an object so massive that its gravity bends the light emitted by objects that are beyond it, so that this light appears to us like a ring or arc around the foreground object.
Gravitational lenses are important for detecting and studying so-called 'dark matter' (which cant' be studied in other ways as it doesn't emit any detectable light), and they are very rare objects, with only around 500 known so far in the whole sky, so this is a really significant achievement by citizen scientists.
One of the most intriguing recent discoveries by a citizen science project is the star known as KIC 8462852. Volunteers in the 'Planet Hunter' programme examine graphs of the light emitted by target stars, which have been obtained by the Kepler mission. They look for tell-tale regular dips in brightness that can indicate the presence of orbiting planets.
Numerous 'exoplanets' have been discovered based on the Kepler data, but this star is weirdly different. It has dips in brightness but they are extremely irregular - sometimes dimming only slightly for days, sometimes dimming dramatically for much shorter periods. The dips appear to be totally random and unpredictable, and astronomers are struggling to come up with an explanation - many theories have been put forward, including the possibility of an alien civilisation influencing its star's light, but so far none of them fit the observations. Astronomers will surely be observing it more closely in the future to try to solve the mystery.
http://www.universetoday.com/82358/hubble-eyes-hannys-voorwerp/
http://astronomynow.com/2015/09/26/citizen-scientists-discover-gravitational-lenses-via-spacewarps-project/
http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/curious-case-of-kic-8462852-102020155/
http://www.galaxyzoo.org/
http://spacewarps.org/
http://www.planethunters.org/
1. NASA, ESA, W. Keel (Univ. Alabama), et al., Galaxy Zoo Team
2. Space Warps, Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey
3.T. Boyajian & others / MNRAS