Part 3 of the TED Radio Hour episode Citizen Science.
About Tabetha Boyajian's TED Talk
In 2009, the Kepler telescope was sent out to search for other planets. But when astronomer Tabetha Boyajian asked thousands of amateurs to comb through Kepler's data, they found something entirely unexpected.
About Tabetha Boyajian
Planet hunter Tabetha Boyajian studies KIC 8462852 (dubbed "Tabby's star"): a star exhibiting bizarre variations in brightness. These fluctuations have led to a host of theories ranging from comet dust to alien megastructures.
Boyajian is a postdoc with the Yale Exoplanet group, whose research is assisted by the Planet Hunters — a citizen science group that combs data from the NASA Kepler Space Mission for evidence of exoplanets and other unusual interstellar activity.
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