Astronomers make intriguing discovery thanks to a citizen scientist

Citizen scientists all over the world work to aid in scientific discovery by combing through data and looking to the sky with backyard telescopes.

And today, a discovery detailed in a newly-released study shows how that hard work can pay off.

Thanks to amateur astronomer Thomas Jacobs of Bellevue, Washington, scientists have found evidence of comets circling a star called KIC 3542116 that's 800 light-years away from Earth.

Jacobs was sifting through data collected by the Kepler Space Telescope in his spare time and came across an unusual signal in the noise. He got in touch with physics professor Saul Rappaport, and Rappaport got to work.

"I could name 10 types of things these people have found in the Kepler data that algorithms could not find, because of the pattern-recognition capability in the human eye," Rappaport said in a statement.

Via Giphy

Researchers now think that Jacobs saw evidence of between two and six comets passing in front of their host star from Earth's perspective, according to the new study in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

This marks the first time researchers have discovered comets outside our solar system by detecting the minute dips in a star's light created when an object passes across its face.

Called the transit method, this form of detection has been used by Kepler for years to hunt for distant planets, but using that data to look for comets is something new and exciting.

In total, Kepler recorded six possible comet transits of KIC 3542116.

"It's amazing that something several orders of magnitude smaller than the Earth can be detected just by the fact that it's emitting a lot of debris," Rappaport, an author of the study detailing the exocomet find, said in a statement. "It's pretty impressive to be able to see something so small, so far away."

Rappaport and his team figured out that they were looking at comets thanks to some astronomical sleuthing of their own.

Via Giphy

Instead of seeing a clean signal like the one produced during a transit of a planet, the light blocked by the comet's tail is more asymmetrical, Rappaport said. Scientists have seen that kind of signal before.

"Rappaport realized that the asymmetry in the light curves resembled disintegrating planets, with long trails of debris that would continue to block a bit of light as the planet moves away from the star," the Royal Astronomical Society said in a statement.

That said, a disintegrating planet's signal usually comes around again and again as the world orbits its star, but there was no repetition in Jacobs' Kepler data.

"We thought, the only kind of body that could do the same thing and not repeat is one that probably gets destroyed in the end," Rappaport said."The only thing that fits the bill, and has a small enough mass to be destroyed, is a comet."