Join the Search for New Nearby Worlds
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- Visualizations by:
- Krystofer Kim
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- Written by:
- Francis Reddy
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- Scientific consulting by:
- Marc Kuchner
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- Produced by:
- Scott Wiessinger
- View full credits
Join the search for new worlds in the outer reaches of our solar system and in nearby interstellar space at Backyard Worlds: Planet 9.
Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab/Krystofer D.J. Kim
Music: "Novelty Act" from Killer Tracks
Watch this video on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel.
Complete transcript available.
A new website funded by NASA lets the public search for new worlds in the outer reaches of our solar system and in neighboring interstellar space. The website, called Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, allows everyone to participate in the search though brief movies made from images captured by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission. The movies highlight sources that have gradually moved across the sky.
The new website uses WISE all-sky data to search for unknown objects in and beyond our own solar system. In 2016, astronomers at the California Institute of Technology showed that several distant solar system objects possessed orbital features indicating they were affected by the gravity of an as-yet-undetected planet, which the researchers nicknamed "Planet Nine." If Planet Nine exists and is as bright as some predictions, it could show up in WISE data.
The search also may discover more distant objects like brown dwarfs, sometimes called failed stars, in nearby interstellar space. These strange objects form like stars but evolve like planets, the coldest ones being much like Jupiter.
On the website, people around the world can work their way through millions of "flipbooks," which are brief animations showing how small patches of the sky changed over several years. Moving objects flagged by users will be prioritized by the science team for later follow-up observations by professional astronomers. Participants will share credit for their discoveries in any scientific publications that result from the project.
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Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
However, individual items should be credited as indicated above.
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Animator
- Krystofer Kim (KBR Wyle Services, LLC) [Lead]
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Science writer
- Francis Reddy (University of Maryland College Park) [Lead]
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Scientist
- Marc Kuchner (NASA/GSFC) [Lead]
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Producer
- Scott Wiessinger (KBR Wyle Services, LLC) [Lead]
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Support
- Genna Duberstein (ADNET Systems, Inc.)
Series
This visualization can be found in the following series:Related Pages
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ID: 12660 Produced Video
New Brown Dwarf Found by NASA-funded Citizen Science Project
Read moreThis illustration shows the average brown dwarf is much smaller than our sun and low mass stars and only slightly larger than the planet Jupiter. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center || Dwarf_Scale_Final_1080.png (1920x1080) [11.3 MB] || Dwarf_Scale_Final_1080.jpg (1920x1080) [764.2 KB] || Dwarf_Scale_Final_1080_print.jpg (1024x576) [278.7 KB] || Dwarf_Scale_Final_5k.png (5760x3240) [92.8 MB] || Dwarf_Scale_Final_5k.jpg (5760x3240) [4.1 MB] || Dwarf_Scale_Final_4k.png (3840x2160) [43.1 MB] || Dwarf_Scale_Final_4k.jpg (3840x2160) [1.7 MB] ||
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ID: 11436 Produced Video
Disk Detective: Search for Planetary Habitats
Read moreA new NASA-sponsored website, DiskDetective.org, lets the public discover embryonic planetary systems hidden among data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission. The site is led and funded by NASA and developed by the Zooniverse, a collaboration of scientists, software developers and educators who collectively develop and manage the Internet's largest, most popular and most successful citizen science projects. WISE, located in Earth orbit and designed to survey the entire sky in infrared light, completed two scans between 2010 and 2011. It took detailed measurements of more than 745 million objects, representing the most comprehensive survey of the sky at mid-infrared wavelengths currently available. Astronomers have used computers to search this haystack of data for planet-forming environments and narrowed the field to about a half-million sources that shine brightly in the infrared, indicating they may be "needles": dust-rich circumstellar disks that are absorbing their star's light and reradiating it as heat. Planets form and grow within these disks. But galaxies, interstellar dust clouds, and asteroids also glow in the infrared, which stymies automated efforts to identify planetary habitats. Disk Detective incorporates images from WISE and other sky surveys in the form of brief animations the website calls flip books. Volunteers view a flip book and then classify the object based on simple criteria, such as whether the image is round or includes multiple objects. By collecting this information, astronomers will be able to assess which sources should be explored in greater detail. The project aims to find two types of developing planetary environments. The first, known as young stellar object disks, typically are less than 5 million years old, contain large quantities of gas, and are often found in or near young star clusters. For comparison, our own solar system is 4.6 billion years old. The other type of habitat is called a debris disk. These systems tend to be older than 5 million years, possess little or no gas, and contain belts of rocky or icy debris that resemble the asteroid and Kuiper belts found in our own solar system. Vega and Fomalhaut, two of the brightest stars in the sky, host debris disks. Through Disk Detective, volunteers will help the astronomical community discover new planetary nurseries that will become future targets for NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope. ||
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