海角大神

NASA scientists are trying to find new planets. And they need your help.听

Through its new website, Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, NASA invites the average star-gazer to study grainy images of space in search of undiscovered worlds.

Between 2010 and 2011, NASA鈥檚 Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission scanned the entire sky to create the most complete survey of mid-infrared wavelengths to date. But the images gathered from the WISE mission still need to be studied.

鈥淭here are too many images for us to search through ourselves,鈥� .

Citizen-scientists will look for real celestial objects such as brown dwarfs and low-mass stars.听And if they are fortunate, participants may find one of two big-ticket discoveries: a star closer to the sun than its current neighbor Proxima Centauri, or maybe even the sun鈥檚 ninth planet.听

鈥淭here are just over four light-years between Neptune and Proxima Centauri, the nearest star, and much of this vast territory is unexplored,鈥� lead researcher Marc Kuchner, an astrophysicist at NASA鈥檚 Goddard Space Flight Center, said听. 鈥淏ecause there鈥檚 so little sunlight, even large objects in that region barely shine in visible light. But by looking in the infrared, WISE may have imaged objects we otherwise would have missed.鈥澨�

The Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 team says that听technology is not advanced enough to analyze all of WISE鈥檚 images: they need the human eye.

鈥淎utomated searches don鈥檛 work well in some regions of the sky, like the plane of the Milky Way galaxy, because there are too many stars, which confuses the search algorithm,鈥� ,听a physicist who specializes in analyzing WISE images, said in a press release.

The moving pictures are full of 鈥渂lurry blobs of light,鈥� called 鈥済hosts.鈥� These ghosts can move around, change color, and ultimately fool NASA鈥檚 analysis software.

鈥淏ut with your powerful human eyes, you can help us recognize real objects of interest that move among these artifacts,鈥� . 鈥淵ou鈥檒l be able to tell what objects are real by the way they move around differently from the artifacts.鈥澨�

Through the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 website, anyone can study WISE鈥檚 images and tag moving objects that could potentially be more than a ghost. Professional astronomers will later follow-up on the tagged objects and use their expertise to see if a new discovery was made. And if any scientific publication comes of this project, the citizen-scientist will receive shared credit.听

By inviting the masses to comb through its data, NASA might even find the next Clyde Tombaugh.听

In 1930, American astronomer Mr. Tombaugh spent hours staring into a device called a 鈥渂link comparator鈥� that tracks the movement of objects between two separate photographic plates 鈥� a strategy similar to the one employed by NASA today. And Tombaugh鈥檚 hard work paid off: .

Finding a听ninth planet would be very difficult 鈥� but not necessarily impossible.听

In 2016, California Institute of Technology astronomers Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin . According to their calculations, Planet 9 would be 10 times larger than Earth and 1,000 times farther away from the sun. Just last month, a study from New Mexico State University suggested that Planet Nine could be a 鈥�,鈥� recently sucked in by the sun鈥檚 gravitational pull.听