Citizen Scientists Discover Thousands of Eclipsing Binary Stars

Produced by the Space Telescope Science Institute’s Office of Public Outreach in collaboration with NASA’s Universe of Learning partners: Caltech/IPAC, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

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Images of galaxies planets stars and nebulae slide across the screen; a white line moves horizontally across the middle of the screen. Text: News From The Universe. Animation. Below us in the vast darkness of space, two bright blue circles orbit each other. Text: Citizen scientists discover thousands of eclipsing binary stars. July 11, 2025. NASA's Eclipsing Binary Patrol citizen science project has discovered nearly 8,000 pairs of stars that eclipse one another from our point of view. Now at eye level, the glowing blue stars continue to orbit each other. Text: The project combined artificial intelligence and human pattern-matching skills to comb through data from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite TESS Now the stars glow orange; a small dark dot moves across the stars. A graph appears below the stars with the vertical axis labeled brightness and the horizontal axis labeled time. A line that dips at intervals moves across the graph; a glowing orange bar flashes briefly at each dip, in time with the stars' orbit. Text: The same type of detail-oriented research can reveal planets orbiting around one or both of the stars. The small dark dot appears again moving across the screen over the stars. The graph moves towards the center of the screen; bars now appear all across the graph aligned with the dips. The bars at each end of the graph are green and labeled T.O.I. 1338b. All other bars are red. Text: Citizen scientists are playing an important role in astronomy as new telescopes return more and more data. Learn how you can get involved at nasa.gov/citizen hyphen science. Text: This news was brought to you in part by the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

 

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