If you ever wanted to help find new planets, now’s your chance - Ars Technica

The team behind a planet-hunting telescope array called the Next-Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) is looking for help with the large volume of data the instrument has produced.

The NGTS scans large areas of the sky with a collection of small, robotic telescopes to detect dips in stars' light that are caused by a planet passing between the stars and Earth.

The team now has a lot of data, which it has sifted through using computers.

One of the most successful means of searching for exoplanets has been the transit method, in which a telescope repeatedly observes the amount of light originating from a star.

These dips have a very stereotypical shape if you plot them over time in what's called a light curve, with a fairly steep drop as the planet swings in front of the star, followed by a long, flat reduction.

But there are other phenomena that can cause similar-looking dips in a light curve, plus a bunch of factors that create noise that computers have a hard time distinguishing from a signal.

As a result of these difficulties, the NGTS team has many potential transits that have been flagged as interesting-looking by its software.

These include things like gaps in the data, a mischaracterized curve, and the chaotic mess caused by stellar variability.