Astronomy Live: The Scientific Discoveries Led by Citizen Scientists
AMNH astronomers explore how amateur volunteers have driven real discoveries, from exoplanet hunting to galaxy classification using modern data tools.
Why we picked this
The citizen science story in astronomy is genuinely surprising — amateurs have found exoplanets professionals missed. This talk makes the case that the boundaries between expert and amateur science are more porous than anyone admits.
Citizen science in astronomy isn’t a feel-good PR exercise. Over the past two decades, volunteers with no formal training have contributed to peer-reviewed discoveries: new exoplanets flagged in Kepler data, galaxy morphologies classified through Zooniverse, even the identification of previously unknown stellar phenomena. This talk examines the real science behind those contributions.
AMNH astronomers will walk through specific discovery cases, explaining what tools and datasets made large-scale volunteer participation possible and what kinds of pattern recognition human eyes still outperform algorithms on. The picture that emerges is of a scientific ecosystem where institutional researchers and distributed amateurs are increasingly working the same problems from different angles.
For anyone curious about space or about how modern science actually gets done, this is a grounded, evidence-rich conversation at the American Museum of Natural History.