Herbig-Haro 30 is the prototype of a
gas-rich "young stellar object" disk around a star. The dark disk spans
40 billion miles (64 billion kilometers) in this image from NASA's
Hubble Space Telescope, cutting the bright nebula in two and blocking
the central star from direct view. Image credit NASA/Hubble/STScI. Full image and caption
NASA is inviting the public to help astronomers discover embryonic
planetary systems hidden among data from the agency's Wide-field
Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission through a new website,
DiskDetective.org.
Disk Detective is NASA's largest crowdsourcing project whose primary
goal is to produce publishable scientific results. It exemplifies a new
commitment to crowdsourcing and open data by the United States
government.
"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," said James Garvin, the chief scientist for NASA Goddard's
Sciences and Exploration Directorate.
WISE was designed to survey the entire sky at infrared wavelengths. From
a perch in Earth orbit, the spacecraft completed two scans of the
entire sky between 2010 and 2011. It took detailed measurements on 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 infrared, indicating they
may be "needles": dust-rich disks that are absorbing their star's light
and reradiating it as heat.
"Planets form and grow within disks of gas, dust and icy grains that
surround young stars, but many details about the process still elude
us," said Marc Kuchner, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight
Center in Greenbelt, Md. "We need more examples of planet-forming
habitats to better understand how planets grow and mature."
But galaxies, interstellar dust clouds and asteroids also glow in
infrared, which stymies automated efforts to identify planetary
habitats. There may be thousands of nascent solar systems in the WISE
data, but the only way to know for sure is to inspect each source by
eye, which poses a monumental challenge.
Public participation in scientific research is a type of crowdsourcing
known as citizen science. It allows the public to make critical
contributions to the fields of science, technology, engineering and
mathematics by collecting, analyzing and sharing a wide range of data.
NASA uses citizen science to engage the public in problem-solving.
Kuchner recognized that spotting planetary nurseries is a perfect
opportunity for crowdsourcing. He arranged for NASA to team up with the
Zooniverse, a collaboration of scientists, software developers and
educators who collectively develop and manage citizen science projects
on the Internet. The result of their combined effort is Disk Detective.
Disk Detective incorporates images from WISE and other sky surveys in
brief animations the website calls flip books. Volunteers view a flip
book and 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, for example, to search for planets outside
our solar system.
"Disk Detective's simple and engaging interface allows volunteers from
all over the world to participate in cutting-edge astronomy research
that wouldn't even be possible without their efforts," said Laura Whyte,
director of citizen science at Adler Planetarium in Chicago, Ill., a
founding partner of the Zooniverse collaboration.
The project aims to find two types of developing planetary environments.
The first, known as a young stellar object disk, typically is less than
5 million years old, contains large quantities of gas, and often is
found in or near young star clusters. For comparison, our own solar
system is 4.6 billion years old. The second planetary environment, known
as a debris disk, tends to be older than 5 million years, possesses
little or no gas, and contains 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.
WISE was shut down in 2011 after its primary mission was completed. But
in September 2013, it was reactivated, renamed Near-Earth Object
Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE), and given a new mission,
which is to assist NASA's efforts to identify the population of
potentially hazardous near-Earth objects (NEOs). NEOWISE also can assist
in characterizing previously detected asteroids that could be
considered potential targets for future exploration missions.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., manages and
operates WISE for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. The WISE mission
was selected competitively under NASA's Explorers Program managed by the
agency's Goddard Space Flight Center. The science instrument was built
by the Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah. The spacecraft was
built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo.
Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared
Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of
Technology, which manages JPL for NASA.
For more information about Disk Detective, please visit: http://www.diskdetective.org
For more information about NASA's WISE mission, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/wise
Whitney Clavin 818-354-4673
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
whitney.clavin@jpl.nasa.gov
J.D. Harrington 202-358-5241
Headquarters, Washington
j.d.harrington@nasa.gov
