NASA’s Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft 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...