Contrary to what some people may believe, big telescopes or radio telescopes are not necessarily needed to help scientists in the search for exoplanets and extra-terrestrial intelligence.

Any person can easily help from the comfort of home and without spending a single dollar.

The most famous project is ‘Planet Hunters’, a website where users were able to analyze data gathered by the Kepler Space Telescope and now data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).

A similar project and probably the easiest one to use is ‘Exoplanet Explorers’, another website to analyze data from the K2 mission of the Kepler Space Telescope.

The videogame ‘Eve Online’ also launched a mini-game called ‘Project Discovery’, where users can analyze data from the COROT space telescope.

Light curve in Eve Online

For those citizen scientists who want to deepen into the search for exoplanets, there is a program slightly more difficult to use than the previous ones. This software, ‘Systemic Console 2’, enables to analyze data from the Keck Observatory and published by the ‘Carnegie Institution for Science’.

More recently, ‘The Exoplanets Channel’, which is a YouTube channel dedicated to the world of habitable exoplanets, extra-terrestrial intelligence and interstellar travel, demonstrated in one of his videos how to detect exoplanets with the cheapest possible equipment.

Alberto Caballero, the author of the channel, shows how to detect an exoplanet with a 48mm-aperture telephoto lens, a CMOS camera and an equatorial mount.

He does so by using the transit method, which consists in detecting a drop in the brightness of a star produced by an exoplanet passing in front of the star from our point of view.

Alberto is also the coordinator of the Habitable Exoplanet Hunting Project, an international network of more than 30 observatories searching for nearby habitable exoplanets. Amateur astronomers have the opportunity to participate in this project.

Finally, citizen scientists can also help in the detection of possible extra-terrestrial radio signals. ‘SETI@home’ is a scientific project that uses Internet-connected computers in the search for intelligent life in exoplanets and exo-moons.

Data analysis in SETI@home

Users can participate by running in their computers a program called ‘BOINC’ that downloads and analyzes radio signals. The data comes from the Arecibo Observatory, the Green Bank Telescope and the Low Frequency Array.

Today, more than ever, scientists need citizens to help them analyze millions of data, which will continue exponentially growing with time as technology improves.