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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.
NASA is crowdsourcing the search for exoplanets
To those of you who dream of going to space: Sorry, but that may never happen. However, NASA is once again counting on the public for help understanding what's beyond our world. All we have to do is look at some photos online. Today marks the launch of Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, a project that relies on everyday people to help scientists identify objects near our solar system. These celestial bodies appear to move across the sky, but computers have a hard time finding things like brown dwarfs and planets in the noisy images. This means manually searching the photos is the most effective method to get the job done.
