What do you think?

In the battle of man/woman vs. machine some say this is a win for the humble astronomer.  Experts think computers would have missed this exciting discovery.  In a sense sophisticated algorithms, even in astronomy are deployed to detect patterns and sift through massive amounts of data.  However, in this particular case they think the algos would have overlooked this star:

The internet was abuzz with rumors of a strange star that some suggested might host an extraterrestrial construction. Astronomers say that scenario is a slim possibility. A more likely explanation is that the weird star, called KIC 8462852, is orbited by a swarm of comets, which is a pretty interesting idea on its own. But either way, this intriguing star might never have been found. The oddball was just one of thousands of stars being monitored by NASA’s Kepler telescope, which searches for the telltale dips in a star’s light caused when exoplanets pass in front of it.

At first thought you might think a computer could be programmed to find something like this star.  Here is the reason why some of the experts in the field seem to disagree:

Computers spot most of the promising planet candidates in the data, but this star would have fallen through the cracks if volunteer citizen scientists had not flagged its unusual signature. “This wouldn’t have been picked up by a computer algorithm,” says Yale University astronomer Tabetha Boyajian, who manages the Planet Hunters crowdsourcing project to analyze Kepler’s data. “We weren’t looking for something like this.”

The volunteers’ human eyes noticed that the light from KIC 8462852 sometimes got fainter by as much as 20 percent.

Apparently they don’t think an algorithm could have noticed the amount of dimming.  What do you think?  Feel free to comment with your ideas.

thanks to scientificamerican.com for the great info

thanks to NASA for the pic