Transcripts of 11436_Disk_Detective2_H264_Good_1280x720_29

[Music] I'm Marc Kuchner, a researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and I work on understanding distant planetary systems. A major quest of astronomers during the past 30 years has been to discover exoplanets and 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 few of these sources might actually be stars with disks, but 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 the possible sources. That's why NASA and Zooniverse are launching Disk Detective, a new citizen science project. At DiskDetective.org, you'll see animated flipbooks 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. When you go to the site and classify objects, you'll be helping me and other NASA scientists figure out which is which. DiskDetective.org is a NASA-led crowdsourcing project whose main goal is to produce publishable scientific results. The disks we find together will be future targets for 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. [Music] [Music] [Beeping] [Beeping]