Amateur astronomers discover new planet

Telegraph : Two British amateur astronomers, Chris Holmes and Lee Threapleton, may have discovered a new planet. Inspired by Brian Cox’s Stargazing Live TV series, they studied time-lapse images of stars posted online at Planethunters.org . The site, which is part of the Zooniverse citizen science project, encourages users to identify extrasolar planets from data recorded by the Kepler space telescope. Holmes and Threapleton looked for anomalies in light patterns and found that a planet appeared to be orbiting a sun called SPH10066540, which lies 600–3000 light-years away. Thought to be gaseous and about the size of Neptune, the new planet will be named Threapleton Holmes B, provided the discovery is authenticated.