Amateur astronomers classify 2 million unidentified heavenly bodies in distant galaxies

More than 40,000 amateur astronomers discovered two million unidentified heavenly bodies, which include five sought-after supernovas and extremely bright exploding stars.

The haystack of celestial data, found by the SkyMapper telescope at the Australian National University (ANU), provided crucial information about the history and future of the universe.

The SkyMapper telescope, at the Siding Spring Observatory near Coonabarabran in central New South Wales, was creating a digital survey of the entire southern sky with a detailed record of more than a billion stars and galaxies.

Under the volunteer project, amateur astronomers looked for differences in photos of the same patch of sky, taken at different times.

Apart from the supernovas, they also found a number of variable stars and a raft of asteroids, some never previously discovered.

Because they are so bright, supernovas are used as beacons to measure the most distant galaxies. Their study led to the discovery of the accelerating universe by Professor Brian Schmidt for which he shared the 2011 Nobel Prize.

The scientists hope that the large data set from the program will enable them to train computers to automate the identification process.

The program was a five-day supernova hunt run by the Zooniverse platform run by a team based at the University of Oxford, in collaboration with the annual BBC Stargazing Live. It attracted volunteers in Britain and as far afield as the United States and New Zealand.