EVE Online Players to Help Search For Real-World Exoplanets

This unique scientific crowdsourcing effort represents a collaboration between CCP and several scientific institutions.

Some really exciting news for players of CCP’s hit space-faring MMO EVE Online: You’ll soon be able to help real-world scientists by searching for, and identifying, actual planets outside of our solar system. Within EVE‘s virtual universe, players will interact with real-world astronomical data provided by the University of Geneva through a fully integrated part of the EVE Online game experience called Project Discovery. Once enough players reach comparative consensus on classification of the data, it will be sent back to the University of Geneva for use in refining the search for exoplanets.

“We were thrilled to see the successes of our first foray into citizen science, in which EVE players have been voracious contributors to the database of the Human Protein Atlas,” said Andie Nordgren, EVE‘s Executive Producer.

“In searching for the next dataset for our massive player community to tackle, the stars aligned for players to have the opportunity to directly contribute to the search for new planets with a world-renowned scientific team. Real people around the world collaborating in a virtual universe to explore the real universe is the stuff science fiction, and soon science fact, is made of.”

University of Geneva professor Michel Mayor will offer more details on the project on April 6-8 at the EVE Fanfest 2017 in Reykjavik, Iceland.

Source: CCP Games