NASA's Disk Detective Project Relaunches with 150,000 Stars

Thursday, June 25, 2020 - 17:50 in Astronomy & Space

Disk Detective is back! Disk Detective is the NASA citizen science project that previously discovered “Peter Pan” disks (the longest-lived disks that form planets), as well discovered the youngest nearby disk around a brown dwarf (a ball of gas too small to be considered a star). The project is relaunching with a new batch of 150,000 stars to analyze and looking to the public for help. This new version of the project is Disk Detective 2.0, a sequel to the original version that launched back in 2014 and has been offline since last April while researchers worked on following up roughly 50,000 disk discoveries. Planets form inside giant disks of gas and dust that circle young stars. Observing these disks, called protoplanetary disks, teaches us how long it takes planets to form. Disk Detectives help find where planets are forming and where planets probably remain today by searching for stars that...

Read the whole article on Science @ NASA

More from Science @ NASA

Latest Science Newsletter

Get the latest and most popular science news articles of the week in your Inbox! It's free!

Check out our next project, Biology.Net