Stellar Explosion Discovered Thanks to Puzzle Game

The explosion of a star was discovered thanks to the participation of ordinary citizens engaged in a game of 'cosmic' puzzles: 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 journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

It resembles the puzzle game 'spot the difference' 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 a few days apart. "Kilonova Seekers represents a unique opportunity for the public to try their hand at astrophysics," said Killestein. The system in fact allows for the analysis of thousands of photos per day, which really helps to get rid of part of the long analysis work that would otherwise be impossible given the large amount of information arriving every day from telescopes. In this case, some participants, just 3 and a half hours after the shots, identified the presence of a new point of light called GOTO0650, a so-called cataclysmic variable star, or 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 alert for other types of telescopes so that they can focus 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 truly represents the culmination of two years of hard, consistent work by our volunteers. Without the Kilonova Seekers volunteers who flagged this object, rapid follow-up would not have been possible and this object may have been completely missed."