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Citizen scientists find a failed star in the Sun's neighborhood
Citizen scientists may not have the time and equipment of their pro counterparts, but their dedication can sometimes lead to discoveries that would otherwise be impractical. Case in point: a NASA-backed citizen science initiative, Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, has found a brown dwarf (effectively, a failed star) relatively close to the Sun at 110 light years away. Rosa Castro and three other amateur observers combed through a "flipbook" of images from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer to spot the dwarf as it traversed through space. The discovery is notable for a few reasons, and not just because dedicated astronomers didn't catch it.
An excess of 'failed' stars is a bad sign for alien life
We know for a fact that life can exist on planets that orbit yellow dwarf stars like our sun and are optimistic about the chances for smaller red dwarf systems like Trappist-1. When it comes to their awkward brown dwarf cousins, however, astronomers don't think life is possible -- they're too small and cool to support it. So it's a bit of a bummer that astronomers have discovered as many as 100 billion brown dwarfs in our galaxy, out of a maximum 400 billion stars in total.
