Stellar explosion discovered with cosmic 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 3,500 people , who over time have analyzed almost 3 million images . The research was coordinated by Tom Killestein, of the British University of Warwick, and Lisa Kelsey, of the University of Cambridge, and is published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

It's reminiscent of the puzzle game ' spot the difference ' but in this case it's on a cosmic scale : it's Kilonova Seekers , an app that asks the public to find the differences between two images of small patches of the night sky but taken a few days apart. "Kilonova Seekers represents a unique opportunity for the public to grapple with astrophysics ," Killestein said.

The system allows in fact to analyze thousands of photos per day and really help to dispose of part of the long analysis work that would otherwise be impossible given the great amount of information arriving every day from the telescopes. In this case some participants, just 3 and a half hours after the shots , identified the presence of a new light bridge called GOTO0650 , a so-called cataclysmic variable star , that is, a pair 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 ongoing explosion 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."