Space exploration is of growing interest in the high-tech community. The X Prize Foundation, a non-profit organisation that develops competitions to promote breakthroughs in space and related technologies, named Google co-founder Larry Page to its board earlier this year, along with Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal and chief of SpaceX, an orbital rocket company.
Late last year, Mojave Aerospace, led by aeronautical engineer Burt Rutan and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, built and flew the world's first private spacecraft to the edge of space to win $10m from the Ansari X Prize.
Google's lead engineer, Wayne Rosing, recently left the company to become a senior fellow in mathematical and physical sciences at the University of California, Davis. Rosing will work on the proposed Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, which is expected to be complete by 2012 and is designed to find dark matter and dark energy created by gravity-bending light from distant galaxies.
PlanetQuest's software, which is a screensaver download that runs during off times of computer usage, contains models of all the different star types and planets that exist. It will absorb data from the remote telescopes, downloading observations on the stars' brightness and the algorithms to match stars and planets. The program analyzes light curves to see what kind of star it is — there are about 147 basic types. The user's computer does the calculations, and if a match occurs, it will send an alert of a new discovery.
"What we do is a dynamic match in between what star catalogues are out there (there aren't many) and what hasn't been classified — then we classify it," Gutelius says.
With the software, people can call up detailed information about the discovery, such as the star's region, where it's located, and its distance in the galaxy.
PlanetQuest's software draws partially on a planet detection method Doyle helped develop that was the basis for NASA's Kepler Mission, a $500m space project to search for habitable planets. The technique, called the transit method, looks to a planet to orbit in front of its parent star. The light drops off, and the star "winks" at you. If the transit is repeatable, then it can be a method for discovering and confirming planets even smaller than Earth. But the wink can be tricky: A star can also wink if it has a spot on it or if there are different coloured stars set in the atmosphere.
