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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.
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