Skip to main content

NASA wants your help identifying the birthplaces of planets

Scientists know that planets form from disks of dust and gas that swirl around young stars, when clumps gradually form and gravity creates planets over millions of years. But they want to learn more about this process, so they need to find more of these protoplanetary disks for observations.

A new project from NASA aims to get the public’s help with this, by inviting them to help identify disks through a website called Disk Detective.

Recommended Videos

“We’re trying to understand how long it takes for planets to form,” astrophysicist Marc Kuchner, the Disk Detective project lead at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the Citizen Science Officer for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, explained in a statement. “Tracing the evolution of these disks is the main way that we know how long planet formation takes.”

This illustration shows a young, Sun-like star encircled by its planet-forming disk of gas and dust.
This illustration shows a young, sun-like star encircled by its planet-forming disk of gas and dust. NASA/JPL-Caltech

To help in this project, you can head to the Disk Detective page on the citizen science platform Zooniverse and select Get Started. The site will show you a tutorial on how to identify a planetary disk, then ask you to select from a list of options describing the object’s shape which will help with classification.

The site has a massive dataset of 150,000 stars, so there are plenty of targets for volunteers to work through. Most of the stars in the dataset are M dwarfs, which are the most common stars in our galaxy, or brown dwarfs, which are cooler and less massive than other stars.

This system has the potential to bring real benefits to scientific research. “We have multiple citizen scientists look at each object, give their own independent opinion, and trust the wisdom of the crowd to decide what things are probably galaxies and what things are probably stars with disks around them,” said Disk Detective’s director, Steven Silverberg, a postdoctoral researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.

Other NASA citizen science projects include inviting the public to help navigate rovers around Mars, help pick a landing site on distant asteroid Bennu, and identify and map the world’s corals. The Disk Detective project has already assisted in some exciting discoveries such as the identification of the closest yet young brown dwarf disk to Earth.

“To figure out how disks evolve, we need a big sample of different kinds of disks of different ages,” Kuchner said. “NASA needs your help. Come discover these disks with us!”

Georgina Torbet
Georgina has been the space writer at Digital Trends space writer for six years, covering human space exploration, planetary…
Citizen scientists spot mysterious object shooting out of the galaxy at 1 million mph
This artist's concept shows a hypothetical white dwarf, left, that has exploded as a supernova. The object at right is CWISE J1249, a star or brown dwarf ejected from this system as a result of the explosion. This scenario is one explanation for where CWISE J1249 came from.

Citizen scientists have helped to identify an incredibly fast-moving object in space, which is traveling at such a speed that it will shoot out of the Milky Way and head out into intergalactic space.

Amateur astronomers working on the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project spotted the object, which was also observed by the recently-retired NASA NEOWISE telescope. The trio of citizen scientists -- Martin Kabatnik, Thomas P. Bickle, and Dan Caselden -- spotted the object named CWISE J124909.08+362116.0 several years ago, and now it has been confirmed they are co-authors on a paper about its discovery.

Read more
NASA answers all of your questions on the troubled Starliner mission
Boeing's Starliner spacecraft docked at the space station.

NASA has updated an FAQ page on its website with the latest information on the state of Boeing Space’s beleaguered Starliner mission.

With so much speculation surrounding the state of the spacecraft, the page offers a definitive guide on where the mission is at right now.

Read more
NASA’s axed moon rover could be resurrected by Intuitive Machines
An illustration of NASA's Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) on the lunar surface.

Lunar scientists were shocked and dismayed last month when NASA announced that it was canceling work on its moon rover, VIPER. The Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover was intended to search the moon's south pole for evidence of water there, but NASA said that it had to ax the project due to increasing costs.

This week, an open letter to Congress called the cancellation of the mission "unprecedented and indefensible," and questioned NASA's assertion that the cancellation of the mission would not affect plans to send humans to the moon. Scientists argued that the mission was fundamental to understanding the presence of water on the moon, which is a key resource for human exploration, as well as an issue of scientific interest.

Read more