The U.S National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is inviting space enthusiasts to find new solar systems.
This new project called Disk Detective, invites the public to aid in the discovery of potential solar systems left unnoticed in the pile of data captured by the agency's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). The agency aims to find a young stellar object disks and debris disks.
"Through Disk Detective, volunteers will help the astronomical community discover new planetary nurseries that will become future targets for NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope," said James Garvin, scientist for NASA Goddard's Sciences and Exploration Directorate, in a press release.
The participants will be looking for young stellar object disks containing large quantities of gas and should be less than 5 million years old. These are usually found close to young star clusters. The debris disk, on the other hands, must have belts of rocky or icy debris that looks like Kuiper belts. It also contains minimum or zero amount of gas and is typically more than 5 million years old.
WISE is an astronomical space telescope that was launched in December 2009. Between 2010 an 2011, it carried out a couple of scans of the entire sky and was able to gather an enormous portfolio of detailed observations of over 745 million objects. With the use of computers, the collection was narrowed down to about half a million sources that shined brightly in infrared. These brightly-shining objects can be areas where planets are in the process of formation.
Disk Detective is the latest in the Zooniverse collection of "citizen-science projects" and the discoveries will be of real interest to practiced astronomers.
Zooniverse is a website hosting different kinds of projects that produce several one-of-a-kind scientific findings. It requires active participation of human participants to perform and complete research tasks.
Volunteer participants in the latest Zooniverse project will take a look flip books, a compilation of images captured by WISE and other sky surveys in brief animations. After scanning and reviewing images, they will make judgments. Their findings will allow specialized astronomers to explore and review those in greater detail.
