Welcome to a new Planet Hunters!

We’re extremely happy to welcome a new member of the PlanetHunters family. Planet Hunters: NGTS is our first project using data from a ground based survey – the Next Generation Transit Search based at Paranal in the Atacama Desert in Chile.The twelve telescopes of NGTS aim to find planets around the brightest stars; the hope is that, unlike the large number of planets found with NASA’s Kepler, which provided data for the original Planet Hunters, these will be targets that can be followed up with further observations designed to characterise their mass, composition and atmospheres.

As with the Exoplanet Explorers project we ran on Zooniverse a while back, the aim of this new project is to review candidates that have been selected by automatic searches. The hope is that this will make our hit rate higher, but it does mean the task is a little different. The project lives on its own webpage as ngts.planethunters.org, and is led by Meg Schwamb, Chris Watson and Sean O’Brien at Queen’s University Belfast, along with their colleagues. They’ll be responsible for looking at your data, with the help of the Planet Hunters:TESS team.

With this new project there should be enough data to keep you all searching for more than the few days each month TESS data is available. Happy hunting!

(Image: the NGTS telescopes in Paranal, with ESO’s Very Large Telescope visible in the background).