Eve Online is crowdsourcing the search for real planets beyond the Solar System

The wisdom of the crowd is coming to astronomy.

Developer CCP Games revealed today that it will use Eve Online to power the scientific search for exoplanets, which are planets that exist outside of the Solar System. For this project, the studio is partnering with the University of Reykjavik in its home country of Iceland as well as the University of Geneva and Michel Mayor, the honorary professor who discovered the first exoplanet. This is a kind of massive “citizen science” effort that CCP is calling MMOS, or massively multiplayer online science. And it could help real, trained researchers make important discoveries.