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I WANT to hunt for shooting stars, but it’s cold outside so I’m starting the search from my living room. You can do the same by joining the

If you have ever seen a shooting star, you were probably witnessing a small solid object called a meteoroid whizzing into Earth’s atmosphere from outer space. Meteoroids orbit the sun on various trajectories at tens of kilometres per second, sometimes ending up on a collision course with Earth. We see this as a meteor flying through the atmosphere, commonly referred to as a shooting or falling star.

The Radio Meteor Zoo project is calling for volunteers to help identify signs of meteors in radio data collected during meteor showers, which occur when many meteoroids pass through Earth’s atmosphere in parallel. You can find the project on the .

As meteoroids fly through the atmosphere, they leave trails of ions and electrons behind that temporarily reflect radio waves transmitted from stations on Earth. These reflected waves can then be detected, and it is these reflections that you can search for in radio spectrograms online.

It is a lot easier than it sounds – all you have to do is draw boxes around all the characteristic bright peaks, known as meteor echoes, that you find on the spectrograms. Researchers, including Stijn Calders and Hervé Lamy at the and their colleagues, can then use the meteor-echo data to work out the mass, speed and trajectory of the meteoroids. That is because the duration of each meteor echo is related to the size of the meteoroid that caused it. The insights gathered could help modellers make predictions about the activity of the comets from which many meteoroids originate, says Calders.

But the researchers need help to dig through the deluge of data flowing in via the Belgian Radio Meteor Stations network – more than 10,000 spectrograms are generated every day. Automatic algorithms can help with signal classification, but so far none are as astute as the human eye.

Fortunately, thousands of volunteers have already lent a hand by participating in the project since it launched in 2016. “Thanks to these volunteers, we have analysed more than 35 different meteor showers,” says Calders.

At the moment, the project is processing data from the 2021 Geminids – a meteor shower derived from an object called 3200 Phaethon, which was discovered in 1983 and is thought to be an asteroid. This makes the Geminids unusual, because most meteor showers originate from comets, which are icy and dusty, rather than asteroids, which are rockier.

To learn more about these celestial events and to join in, visit Radio Meteor Zoo online.

For other projects visit newscientist.com/maker.