Want to discover a new world?

[Sisyphus]

In keeping with the Stadium rating system I'll give this :geek::geek::geek::geek::geek: so you have been warned.

Projects such as SETI@home allowed you to use the idle CPU on your PCs to search through data from radio telescopes for signals from Little Green Men.

There isn't any interaction with SETI@home, so while it got a lot of attention and interest, all users could do was sit back and watch while the PC churned away.

Now there's a new project to participate in for those of us who would like to discover a new world. :cool: We were all born at least a few hundred years late to be Magellan, Columbus, or Cook, but now we can all explore a much bigger 'ocean' without getting scurvy, enduring weevils in our biscuits, or ducking arrows and spears from unwelcoming natives.

Here's the background ... as planets orbit a star they change its radial velocity and cause small shifts in the frequency of light emitted, due to the Doppler effect. A new project will make data on these shifts available, and combined with a modeling program that you drive yourself, you can simulate what size and number of planets would best fit the data for each star.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/print/4933 has some background.

http://planetquest.org/download/ is where you can get the software (as soon as it's available).

Enjoy ... and good luck discovering new worlds. :cool: