WEBVTT FILE

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[Music]

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I'm Marc Kuchner, a researcher at NASA's Goddard Space

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Flight Center, and I work on understanding distant planetary systems.

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A major quest of astronomers during the past 30 years

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has been to discover exoplanets and learn how they form. One strategy

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

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and debris disks. These clouds of gas, rock,

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ice, and dust, are the same types of environments that gave rise to our

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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 this imagery

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because of all the new disks we can find in it. The WISE

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mission imaged about half a billion objects all over the sky. Only a

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few of these sources might actually be stars with disks, but we can't find them

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with computer software because the clues are too subtle. The human eye can

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sort things out, but it would take years for astronomers to visually evaluate

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all the possible sources. That's why NASA and Zooniverse

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are launching Disk Detective, a new citizen science project.

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At DiskDetective.org, you'll see animated flipbooks of

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images from the WISE All-Sky survey and other projects.

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Some images show protoplanetary and debris disks--the homes of

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extrasolar planets. Others contain galaxies, asteroids,

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nebulae and other objects. When you go to the site and

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classify objects, you'll be helping me and other NASA scientists

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figure out which is which. DiskDetective.org

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is a NASA-led crowdsourcing project whose main goal is to

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produce publishable scientific results. The disks we find together

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will be future targets for 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 us.

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[Music]

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[Music]

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[Beeping]

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[Beeping]