Gamers Help Discover Two New Planets

Amateur planet hunters are believed to have discovered two new exoplanets orbiting distant stars.

The discoveries were made via the browser "game" Planet Hunters, which provides images taken by the Kepler space telescope. Planet Hunters asks Internet users to review the brightness of stars in the hope that there are dark spots or "transit features" that would indicate that a planet orbiting that star is found.

Kepler adds new images to an archive of already 150,000 stars every 30 minutes, which suggested that a significant number of humans may be able to discover possible stars much faster than software. Planet Hunter enables players to mark certain stars, if they believe that there is a transit feature. Kepler scientists examine a star if a number of players have marked the same star. Citizen planet hunters reportedly discovered two exoplanets so far.

Last week, researchers at the University of Washington announced that gamers of the game Foldit solved the structure of a retrovirus enzyme.