Citizen scientists helped NASA find brown dwarfs from NASA’s NEOWISE satellite

In a mission titled Backyard Worlds: Planet 9  launched in February 2020, citizen astronomers helped NASA’s scientists discover the existence of a brown dwarf a little more than 100 light-years away from the Sun. According to a press release by NASA on July 11, Museum astronomer Jackie Faherty said NASA could detect rare bizarre objects in the cosmos owing to the ‘backyard astronomers’ that led the science team to some curious objects after observing data from NASA’s NEOWISE satellite.  

Known as the "the first extreme T-type subdwarfs", the unusual brown dwarfs weigh 75 times more than Jupiter, the largest planet in our Solar System, and are about 10 billion years old. As per NASA, these objects that resembled brown dwarfs were a kind of balls of gases that were too huge to be called planets, but at the same time too small to be called stars. Therefore, the celestial bodies agency launched a project for scientists as well as the members of the public interested in astronomy to find these objects floating in the solar system.  

Participants in the NASA-funded Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project led observations of the sky data collected between 2009 and 2011 under its previous moniker, WISE. At least six scientists and co-authors in the study published in The Astrophysical Journal that details these discoveries and the potential implications are the aspiring astronomers.  

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Volunteers found the objects 

Study’s lead author, Adam Schneider of Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration in Tempe, Adam Schneider, was the first to detect one of the unusual brown dwarfs, called WISE 1810, in 2016. However, the challenge was that it was in a crowded area of the sky and was difficult to confirm. Therefore, citizen scientist Dan Caselden, Schneider used the tool called WiseView, created by Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 and found that the object Schneider had seen years ago was moving quickly, and this indicated that the object was a nearby celestial body like a planet or brown dwarf. 

WiseView scrolls through data like a short movie, Schneider said,  so you can see more easily see if something is moving or not.

Another group of citizen scientist including Backyard Worlds participants Paul Beaulieu, Sam Goodman, William Pendrill, Austin Rothermich, and Arttu Sainio discovered the second unusual brown dwarf, WISE 0414, after they observed through hundreds of images taken by WISE. “The discovery of these two brown dwarfs shows that science enthusiasts can contribute to the scientific process,” Schneider said. “Through Backyard Worlds, thousands of people can work together to find unusual objects in the solar neighborhood.” 

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(Images Credit: The Astrophysical Journals/NASA)