Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 tagged posts

1. A brown dwarf can give off some light, allowing scientists — professional or volunteer — to search for the object as it moves across the sky.
Chuck Carter and Gregg Hallinan/Caltech/NASA
2. This gif shows the ‘flipbook’ from which citizen scientists identified the new brown dwarf, marked with the red circle.
Credit: NASA

A new citizen-science tool released earlier this year to help astronomers pinpoint new worlds lurking in the outer reaches of our solar system has already led to a discovery: a brown dwarf a little more than 100 light years away from the Sun. Just 6 days after the launch of the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 website in February, 4 different users alerted the science team to the curious object, whose presence has since been confirmed via an infrared telescope...

This artist’s concept illustrates a close-up view of a cool brown dwarf. Objects like this, drifting just beyond our solar system, have been imaged by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer and could be discovered by Backyard Worlds: Planet 9. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA is inviting the public to help search for possible undiscovered worlds in the outer reaches of our solar system and in neighboring interstellar space. A new website, called Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, lets everyone participate in the search by viewing brief movies made from images captured by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission. It highlight objects that have gradually moved across the sky.

“There are just over 4 light-years between Neptune and Proxima Centauri, the nearest star, and much of this...