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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!
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