About

Finding planets around other stars is hard. But there’s an important trick we can use to study extrasolar planets that also teaches us about where the planets come from.

Planets form from vast clouds of gas, dust, and chunks of rock---clouds that take the shape of disks with stars in the center. We can find out where planets are forming and where planets probably remain today by searching for stars that are surrounded by these disks. Finding these disks, called “debris disks” or “YSO disks” depending on their age and gas content, has been a major quest of astronomers for the last three decades.

NASA’s WISE mission probably made images of thousands of debris disks and YSO disks. Alas, these disks are buried among images of millions of other kinds of astronomical objects like galaxies and nebulae, and mixed in with images that contain artifacts created by the telescope itself. In Disk Detective, you will help astronomers find these disks, homes for extrasolar planets.

Disk Detective is the first NASA led and funded Zooniverse project. It is also the first NASA led and funded crowdsourcing project whose main goal is to produce publishable scientific results. It was built using seed money from NASA's Science Innovation Fund. See the White House’s second Open Government National Action Planfor more information on the U.S. federal government’s commitment to crowdsourcing and open data.

This material is based upon work supported by NASA under grant number NNX13AG53G. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Image Credits:

This project makes use of data products from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS), the Digitized Sky Syrvey (DSS) and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS).

The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) is a joint project of the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology, and NEOWISE, which is a project of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology. WISE and NEOWISE are funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

The Two Micron All Sky Survey is a joint project of the University of Massachusetts and the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center/California Institute of Technology, funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Science Foundation.

The Digitized Sky Survey was produced at the Space Telescope Science Institute under U.S. Government grant NAG W-2166. The images of these surveys are based on photographic data obtained using the Oschin Schmidt Telescope on Palomar Mountain and the UK Schmidt Telescope. The plates were processed into the present compressed digital form with the permission of these institutions.

Funding for the SDSS and SDSS-II has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Participating Institutions, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Japanese Monbukagakusho, the Max Planck Society, and the Higher Education Funding Council for England. The SDSS Web Site is http://www.sdss.org/. The SDSS is managed by the Astrophysical Research Consortium for the Participating Institutions. The Participating Institutions are the American Museum of Natural History, Astrophysical Institute Potsdam, University of Basel, University of Cambridge, Case Western Reserve University, University of Chicago, Drexel University, Fermilab, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Japan Participation Group, Johns Hopkins University, the Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics, the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, the Korean Scientist Group, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (LAMOST), Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Max-Planck-Institute for Astronomy (MPIA), the Max-Planck-Institute for Astrophysics (MPA), New Mexico State University, Ohio State University, University of Pittsburgh, University of Portsmouth, Princeton University, the United States Naval Observatory, and the University of Washington.

This research has made use of the NASA/ IPAC Infrared Science Archive, which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.