Systemic (amateur extrasolar planet search project)

Lore & Background

Systemic was designed and is run by a team including Greg Laughlin of the University of California Santa Cruz, Aaron Wolf of Caltech, Stefano Meschiari and Eugenio Rivera of UC Santa Cruz, and Paul Shankland of the US Naval Observatory. The project uses a downloaded console that presents data sets of radial velocity measurements from Doppler shifts of stars over time. Volunteers can choose between simulated systems (used to refine understanding of real exoplanets) and actual systems, including the Solar System and the Galilean moons of Jupiter hidden among challenge data sets. The program implements orbital mechanics calculations ranging from Keplerian laws to Runge–Kutta methods, and users manipulate the data because multi-body orbits do not yield unique solutions. Results are uploaded and analyzed for goodness of fit and long-term stability; unstable solutions are removed from candidate lists, though transitional instability is considered rare.

Reader's Guide

Systemic's significance lies in its crowdsourced approach to a complex astronomical problem: fitting radial velocity curves to possible planetary systems. The article notes that results from Systemic are not discoveries but possible fits, which could be correct, partially correct, or entirely wrong. The project provides a platform for amateur astronomers to contribute to exoplanet research, with over 450 real and 520 simulated data sets available. The default system, 14 Herculis, has about 20 unique proposed solutions, with the best posted by user EricFDiaz proposing a three-planet system. The project's legacy is in demonstrating how volunteer computing and human pattern recognition can assist in analyzing data that computational methods alone cannot uniquely resolve, while maintaining rigorous stability checks to filter candidate solutions.

Did You Know?

• Systemic includes the real Solar System and the Galilean moons of Jupiter among its challenge data sets.
• The program is written in Java for cross-platform compatibility.
• Results from Systemic are not considered discoveries, only possible fits to the data.
• The best posted solution for 14 Herculis is a three-planet system by user EricFDiaz.