Help NASA find where planets are born


Hubble image of a young stellar object disc around a star
Hubble image of a young stellar object disc around a star, spanning 64 billion kilometers. NASA/Hubble/STScI

Crowdsourcing, scientists are increasingly finding, is an efficient means of conducting busywork. Whether it's sequencing genomes, designing RNA, deciphering HIV proteins, or cataloguing galaxies, the old axiom proves true: many hands do indeed make light work.

NASA has just launched a new project that will bring the power of crowdsourcing to finding embryonic planetary systems tucked away in the data collected by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission.

Using a tool called Disk Detective, launched via Zooniverse, anyone can look at images taken by the WISE telescope and catalog "disks." What the researchers are looking for is dust-rich discs of debris -- places where planets are born.

"Planets form and grow within disks of gas, dust, and icy grains that surround young stars, but many details about the process still elude us," said NASA Goddard Space Flight Center astrophysicist Marc Kuchner in a statement. Kuchner was involved in arranging the collaboration with Zooniverse. "We need more examples of planet-forming habitats to better understand how planets grow and mature."

WISE was launched in December 2009 to perform an astronomical survey of the entire sky in infrared and, during its 10-month mission, captured 1.5 million images. Dust discs appear as round, bright patches in the infrared spectrum as they absorb the light of their stars and radiate it as heat.

However, there are a lot of objects in space that glow in the infrared spectrum, including galaxies, interstellar dust clouds, and asteroids.

By far the best method of classifying them is to study each image with the human eye, which can detect differences and anomalies with far greater accuracy than an automated program.

In Disk Detective, citizen scientists watch a short, flipbook-style animation of an infrared artifact and classify it according to simple, multiple-choice criteria.

Each animation will be viewed by multiple people, decreasing the margin for error. NASA is looking for two types of planet nurseries: young stellar object discs, younger than 5 million years, containing large quantities of gas and often found near young star clusters; and debris discs, older than 5 million years, which contain little gas, but have belts of rocky and icy debris.


You can participate in Disk Detective through the Zooniverse Web site here.

(Source: Crave Australia)


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