Backyard World: Planet 9, a NASA-funded project, had its citizen scientists go through space telescope and satellite data in order to find new space objects waiting to be discovered -- they found a ton.
The paper describing the discovery of 95 brown dwarfs is set to be published this week in the Astrophysical Journal.
Brown dwarfs, also called failed stars, are found in a netherworld between stars and planets. These entities look like cooling members because they lack the mass required to sustain nuclear reactions in their core.
Several of these brown dwarfs observed in the data have temperatures similar to those found on Earth and may have water clouds as well. Even these cool temperatures make it hard to locate these unique brown dwarfs. The project volunteers searched through telescope images searching for pixels showing the motion of the objects in space.
"Despite the abilities of machine learning and supercomputers, there's no substitute for the human eye when it comes to scouring telescope images for moving objects," NASA said in Tuesday's release. The space agency has called it "the largest published sample of these objects ever discovered through a citizen science project."
UC San Diego's Professor of Physics Adam Burgasser and Cool Star Lab researchers used Keck's sensitive Near-Infrared Echellette Spectrometer, or NIRES, to identify several of the weakest and coolest of the newly discovered brown dwarfs. Also contributing to the estimates of the brown dwarf temperature is a follow-up observation by the Las Campanas Observatory, Mont Mégantic Observatory, and NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope
Follow-up observations using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, Mont Mégantic Observatory, and Las Campanas Observatory also contributed to the brown dwarf temperature estimates.
Astronomers with the Backyard Worlds project turned to a worldwide network of more than 100,000 citizen scientists to help locate our Sun's coldest, closest neighbors.
Many volunteers are constantly examining trillions of telescope pixels to recognize the slight movements of neighboring brown dwarfs and planets. Despite advances in supercomputers and machine learning, when it comes to identifying small, moving objects, there's still no substitute for the human eye.
Volunteers from Backyard Worlds have already discovered more than 1,500 stars and brown dwarfs close to the Sun; this recent revelation signifies about 100 of the coldest in that sample. NASA says this is a milestone for any citizen science initiative and has named 0 of the citizens' scientists as co-authors of the paper.
The availability of astronomical catalogs over decades through NOIRLab's Astro Data Lab contributed to making the observations possible.
Particularly important to these brown dwarf discoveries were data sets from NASA's WISE satellite, as well as archival findings from telescopes at the Inter-American Observatory Cerro Tololo and Kitt Peak National Observatory.
