Planet Hunters NGTS update

Hello Planet Hunters community!

I wanted to take the time to say thank you to this amazing community that has been an essential part of my work life for the past 4+ years. I won’t be working on Planet Hunters NGTS in future as I’m changing jobs and won’t be working in astronomy anymore, so before I go and handover the management of the project, I wanted to give an overview of what we’ve achieved, what the past 4 years have been like for me, and bid you all farewell.

We launched Planet Hunters NGTS at the start of my PhD back in 2021 and, as of February 9th 2026, we have received 7,288,804 classifications from 20,883 registered volunteers across 379,470 different light curves between the 3 different workflows. This led to two publications, the first of which announced the discovery of 5 new planet candidates while the second delved deeper into one of these systems to find that it was in fact a binary star system that will provide a useful benchmark for astronomers to test models of how stars evolve. Personally, these discoveries formed the basis for my PhD thesis which I submitted last April and “defended” during my viva in July. The viva was a ~3-hour verbal exam where two experts asked me all about what I’d been doing for the last 4 years and how this contributes to our knowledge of astronomy. I’m pleased to say that they agreed that the discoveries this community helped to make were important contributions to astronomy and I was awarded my PhD! This has been a long, arduous journey for me but one of my regular sources of motivation was always the incredible enthusiasm I was met with whenever I interacted with you, the volunteers. 

In the past year I’ve been working primarily on developing software for the upcoming Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) (unrelated to what I’ve been working on but check out the Rubin Observatory Zooniverse projects!). I’ve tried to keep data flowing on Planet Hunters NGTS in the hope that we might find more interesting astrophysical phenomena hidden in the NGTS data but unfortunately I haven’t had time to search through the final candidate lists myself. With my current position ending, I am passing the analysis I have been able to complete into the extremely capable hands of my PhD supervisor, Dr Meg Schwamb, who will be exploring new directions for the project.

The following paragraph is from my PhD thesis acknowledgements:  “I am thankful to all the citizen scientists who partook in Planet Hunters NGTS. A PhD cannot be done alone, and that is especially true when the work of over 18,000 volunteers provides such a crucial component of this work. I will be forever thankful for the incredible enthusiasm from all those who submitted classifications, discussed candidates on the talk forums and were so excited by the results we were able to achieve together. I hope that I will continue to have the opportunity to work with this passionate and engaged community in the future.” I cannot fully express how thankful I will always be to this community and while currently my career path will see me leave the field of astronomy, I do truly mean the final sentence and I hope this isn’t goodbye but simply, see you later.

Happy classifying,

Sean