Transcripts of G2015_002_Update_to_DiskDetectives_ipod_sm

(Music) Hi! I'm Mark Kuschner, an astronomer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Many of us astronomers, have been searching for exoplanets and trying to learn how they form. One strategy is to search for lots of young stars still surrounded by protoplanetary disks and debris disks. These clouds of gas, rock, ice and dust are the same types of environments that gave rise to our own solar system. From 2010 to 2011 NASA's WISE mission scanned the entire infrared sky and captured beautiful imagery. I'm most excited about this imagery because of all the new disks we can find in it. The WISE mission imaged about half a billion objects all over the sky. Only a small fraction of these sources are actually stars with disks. We can't find them with computer software, because the clues are too subtle. The human eye can sort things out, but it would take years for astronomers to visually evaluate all these different sources. So last year, NASA and Zooniverse launched Disk Detective. At Disk Detective dot org, you can watch ten second videos of images from the WISE All-Sky survey and other projects. Some images show protoplanetary and debris disks - the homes of extrasolar planets. Others contain galaxies, asteroids, nebulae, and other objects. We've asked you to help us figure out which is which. Today we're celebrating that in our first year, volunteers at DiskDetective.org have classified one million videos. The disk candidates they found went to telescopes in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Argentina for follow up. And we expect that the top stars from those lists will become future targets for even bigger telescopes like Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope, which will search for patterns in the disks and for extrasolar planets they may contain. We hope you'll join us as we continue our search! (music) (music) (beeping) (beeping)