WEBVTT FILE

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(Music)

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Hi! I'm Mark Kuschner, an astronomer at NASA's Goddard Space

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Flight Center. Many of us astronomers, have been searching for

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exoplanets and trying to learn how they form. One

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strategy is to search for lots of young stars still surrounded by protoplanetary

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disks and debris disks. These clouds of gas, rock,

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ice and dust are the same types of environments that gave

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rise to our own solar system. From 2010 to 2011

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NASA's WISE mission scanned the entire infrared sky

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and captured beautiful imagery. I'm most excited about

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this imagery because of all the new disks we can find in it.

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The WISE mission imaged about half a billion objects all

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over the sky. Only a small fraction of these sources

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are actually stars with disks. We can't find them with computer

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software, because the clues are too subtle.

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The human eye can sort things out, but it would take years for astronomers

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to visually evaluate all these different sources.

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So last year, NASA and Zooniverse launched Disk Detective.

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At Disk Detective dot org, you can watch

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ten second videos of images from the WISE All-Sky

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survey and other projects. Some images show

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protoplanetary and debris disks - the homes of extrasolar

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planets. Others contain galaxies, asteroids,

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nebulae, and other objects. We've asked you to

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help us figure out which is which. Today we're celebrating

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that in our first year, volunteers at DiskDetective.org

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have classified one million videos. The disk

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candidates they found went to telescopes in California, Arizona,

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New Mexico and Argentina for follow up. And we

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expect that the top stars from those lists will become future targets

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for even bigger telescopes like Hubble and the James Webb Space

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Telescope, which will search for patterns in the disks and for

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extrasolar planets they may contain. We hope you'll join

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us as we continue our search!

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(music)

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(music)

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(beeping)

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(beeping)

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