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Four possible candidates for the elusive Planet Nine have been discovered, following an intense, three-day search involving approximately 60,000 amateur astronomers, coordinated through a Zooniverse citizen science project by Siding Spring Observatory at Australian National University (ANU). In addition, the participants in the search have classified more than four million other objects.

"With the help of tens of thousands of dedicated volunteers sifting through hundreds of thousands of images taken by SkyMapper, we have achieved four years of scientific analysis in under three days," remarks ANU researcher Brad Tucker.
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Due to the limitations presented by our culture’s fledgling space travel technology, simply going to a planet orbiting another star isn’t a practical way of determining whether or not there’s any life there. Instead, researchers are using indirect methods of looking for extra-solar life, such as the conditions presented by the planet’s host star in relation to it’s orbit, the presence of an atmosphere, temperature, and so on. Now, a research team has devised a list of signature gases that astronomers can look for, that might be produced when a potential extraterrestrial organism metabolizes.
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As the old saying goes, life can move pretty fast, but this is especially true in space, where the difference in orbital velocities between two different objects can literally be faster than a speeding bullet. Last month, British astronaut Tim Peake posted a photograph of a 7 mm (1/4 inch) impact chip in one of the International Space Station’s Cupola windows, suspected to have been caused by a miniscule piece of debris no bigger than a few thousandths of a millimeter across.
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