Research notes
Background for citizen astronomers
Reviews and field guides, fully referenced. They are updated as the field changes.
- [1]Amateurs in the archive: How people outside professional astronomy keep making real discoveries, and what AI changes
- [2]Where amateurs can contribute, and how a discovery gets confirmed: A field guide to open research areas, their public data and tools, and the official channels for reporting a candidate
Milestones
| Year | What | Who |
|---|---|---|
| 2007 | Hanny's VoorwerpA Dutch schoolteacher classifying galaxies for Galaxy Zoo spots a glowing green cloud of gas the size of the Milky Way next to a spiral galaxy. | Hanny van Arkel, Galaxy Zoo volunteer |
| 2009 | The Green PeasSmall, bright green galaxies first noticed by volunteers turn out to be a class of compact galaxies forming stars at extreme rates. | Galaxy Zoo volunteers |
| 2012 | PH1b, a planet in a four-star systemVolunteers searching public Kepler data find a planet that orbits a pair of stars inside a system of four stars. | Kian Jek and Robert Gagliano, Planet Hunters volunteers |
| 2016 | The dipping star KIC 8462852Volunteers flag a Kepler star whose brightness drops irregularly by up to about 20 percent, and the team's favoured explanation is a swarm of comet fragments. | Planet Hunters volunteers and a team led by Tabetha Boyajian |
| 2016 | A supernova caught as it beganWhile testing a new camera, an amateur records the first rise of supernova SN 2016gkg at an unprecedented rate of about 40 magnitudes per day. | Víctor Buso, amateur astronomer in Rosario, Argentina |
| 2017 | Kepler-90iA neural network trained on Kepler signals finds an eighth planet around the star Kepler-90. | Christopher Shallue of Google AI and Andrew Vanderburg of the University of Texas at Austin |
| 2019 | The first interstellar cometAn amateur astronomer discovers 2I/Borisov, the first confirmed comet from outside the solar system. | Gennady Borisov, amateur astronomer in Crimea |
| 2020 | TOI-813 bVolunteers find the project's first planet, a Saturn-sized world on an 84-day orbit around a subgiant star. | Planet Hunters TESS volunteers |
| 2020 | TOI-1338 b, TESS's first planet around two starsReviewing systems that volunteers had marked as eclipsing binaries, a student intern spots the transit of a planet that orbits two stars. | Wolf Cukier, high-school intern at NASA Goddard |
| 2021 | ExoMiner validates 301 planetsA deep learning classifier validates 301 new planets in the Kepler archive. | Hamed Valizadegan and colleagues at NASA Ames |
| 2021 | The AccidentA citizen scientist checking candidates from his own software spots a brown dwarf so unlike the others that standard searches had missed it. | Dan Caselden, Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 volunteer |
| 2023 | A ring around QuaoarThree amateurs who watched Quaoar pass in front of a star in 2021 co-author the Nature paper reporting a ring outside the dwarf planet's Roche limit. | Jonathan Bradshaw, Renato Langersek and John Broughton, amateur astronomers in Australia |
| 2024 | A mini-Neptune in a habitable zoneVolunteers find a mini-Neptune on a 272-day orbit in the habitable zone of TOI 4633, a star with a stellar companion. | Planet Hunters TESS volunteers |
| 2024 | VARnetA single-author paper describes a machine learning model built to find variable objects among the nearly 200 billion detections in NEOWISE data. | Matteo (Matthew) Paz, Pasadena high-school student |
| 2024 | A dwarf nova caught in real timeVolunteers sorting live detections from the GOTO telescopes catch a dwarf nova as it brightens by 8.5 magnitudes. | Kilonova Seekers volunteers |
| 2026 | A planet candidate around TIC 4206066An independent researcher using an AI coding agent reports a candidate planet 1.4 times the width of Earth on a 3.18-day orbit in public TESS data. | Pavel Rabtsevich, independent researcher, working with Claude Code |