Live Demo! Make Discoveries & Hunt Galaxies with NASA (Twitch Stream)

Live Demo! Make Discoveries & Hunt Galaxies with NASA (Twitch Stream)

What is said in the film

Hey, everyone. Welcome in. Welcome to our Twitch stream. And Tahira Allen. And today's stream is going to be a little bit different than what we think you're used to.

But trust me, I think you're going to like it. Today, we're diving into how you can actually get involved in real NASA science. And I don't mean just reading cool space facts or looking at pretty space pictu I mean actually contributing to NASA research right from your computer or even your cell phone. I've also got a special guest joining us today. We're super excited to have doctor Marc Kuchner on the stream with us today.

This is NASA's very own citizen science program officer and an astrophysicist. He's going to help walk us through some of these NASA projects that we can participate in from home and get the kicker, even right now on this stream. Hey, Marc, we're so happy to have you here today. Hey, Tahira. Thanks for having me.

Thanks, everyone, for coming by. Yeah, absolutely. So folks, today we're talking about citizen science, which is really just a fancy way of saying science that's powered by everyday people like you, like me, and like, we've got Jared Banky on the line right now. We've got storm here. And we're super excited to have y'all joining us today.

Now, folks, these projects are going to be all kinds of cool stuff. It's anywhere from searching for planets to weather to auroras to asteroids, literally, you name it. We have a project for everyone, and so we even have a brand new project tied to the James Webb Space Telescope that launched today. And so you heard it here first. You're going to see it here first.

We're going to demo that project live today and do some classification together. So strap in. It should be a really fun time. Now before we get to that first project demo, we want to know what else you'd like to explore today. So you can kind of think of it as a choose your own adventure game.

So do you want to learn how to search for new planets in our solar system? That's going to be with Backyard Worlds Planet Nine. Do you want to discover near-Earth asteroids, which are asteroids that enter Earth's neighborhood with the minor Minor Planet project? Or do you want to go cloud hunting on Mars with, you might have guessed it, cloud spotting on Mars. So go ahead and vote in the poll right now in the chat.

Now, while you all drop those votes in Marc, do you have any guesses on who you think's going to win the poll today? Oh my gosh. Well, you know, everyone wants to discover an asteroid and daily minor planet project for volunteers now have asteroids named after them because they just. Wow. You project, on the other hand, you know, Mars is really hot right now.

Can I say cold? And you can find, water ice and carbon dioxide ice in its atmosphere and cloud spotting. Geez. I don't know, maybe it would be cool to find nine. I mean, how many planets do we have in our solar system?

Is it eight? Nine? Nine? Ten, 11? So back in our worlds, planet nine.

You might get the jackpot and, and be the next Clyde Tombaugh at discovering a planet. So that's rough choice. Well, Marc, I think everybody's going for the jackpot. They're going for the win today. And it looks like on the Twitch stream, we've got searching for planets currently winning, but we got some time for the poll to still stay open.

So folks, as you can already tell, today is an interactive stream. We want to hear from you. We're going to be talking back and forth throughout the next hour. So if you've got some questions for doctor Marc right here, drop them in the chat at any time. I'll be monitoring the chat to keep an eye on the stream, and we'll answer them live on air.

Now I've also got some really awesome mod friends in the chat who are helping me out behind the scenes, so be sure to look out for NASA Red crew. We are. If we have not stated it enough. Super excited to be here again. This is a totally fresh way, of doing things.

We're really excited to have this interactive stream and be talking about these incredible opportunities. Now, while y'all are still voting, we're going to walk through the newest project that launched today called Galaxy Z, where you can classify tens of thousands of galaxies from the James Webb Space Telescope mission. Arguably a fan favorite. Now, Marc, can you share your screen and show us how folks can participate and at the same time, can my NASA Red crew friends go ahead and drop the, project link in chat for folks? So that way you can follow along in real time if you want.

All right. Sweet. We've got the project up. Marc, what's the first step here? How do we get involved?

Well, actually, first, what are we working with? Yeah. What are we working with? So this project. Yeah, it's it's hot off the presses.

It launched this morning, and there's already hundreds of people online, chatting about it and working on it together. That's so fun to watch. So, Galaxy Zoo Project has been around looking at different data sets since around 2007. And this is in such a scientific powerhouse. I mean, Galaxy Zoo project has produced more than 450 scientific publications through those years, and now it's supercharged with data from the James Webb Space Telescope.

And this data, as you know, brings the power of this telescope, which can look farther away and hence farther back in time than previous telescopes. So, when we do this project, we're going to be looking at images from James Webb Space Telescope of Galaxies. Sometimes other stuff gets in there, too, but mostly galaxies. And we're going to be classifying them to try to make sense of what they are and, and how they formed and what they mean about today's galaxies. And we may be looking at images that nobody else has ever seen before.

That's super fun. That's crazy. Marc, how is that even possible? You know, you would think that a science team has to see it. Or is there just so much data that's coming down?

How could we be the first people seeing these images from Webb? Today's space telescopes produce data at such a terrific rate, that we need help from from everyone. We can we can ask, to make sense of it. So, although the science team, you know, so lots of people work to process the data, they haven't really had a time to study it, to break it into that kind of postage stamps and zoom in on each galaxy that's been custom processed. And, that's where we really need people's help.

Really, really, staring at these things and thinking about them. Well, quickly, the project page. Where should somebody get started? Well, I guess other than get started. So.

Yeah. So, super easy way to find this project. Galaxy Zorg. And then you show up on this page and, you know, it's like the Learn More button to read about the scientific background. So lots of info here about the survey telescope, but let's just go click Get Started and dive right in.

So if you didn't have me here, yapping at you, there'd be a tutorial which you could follow, which gives you some instructions on, on what you're going to look for and just kind of click through that. And the point is that we're going to zoom in. We're going to focus on whatever is in the center of the image. And we're going to try to make sense of it. Oh, this is an interesting one.

Are two different. So what are we looking at. Is it the same object. So I may actually take that tutorial again see if it's got some more info for us okay. Yeah I think these are just two different scalings oh two different scalings of the same object.

So a scaling is like a process. It's the same data, but it's processed in a different way to highlight different features of that. Right. And so we know we're looking at a galaxy, we're looking at a galaxy. And we're just going to read this question on the right, and it's got some little cartoons for us.

And just try to answer the question best we can. Is the central galaxy simply smooth and rounded with no sign of a disk? Use a little picture of the smooth option, and here is some example. It's kind of tough, and sometimes you'll get a star that gets in there, and then the star will have often six spikes because of the hexagonal symmetry of the James Webb Space Telescope. Yeah.

So what do you think? Do you see a sign of a disk? I don't see the spikes to here. Do you see spikes? I'm I'm going to go smooth.

I'm also going to toss the question to our Twitch streamers right now. If if you're watching and you want to participate, do you think it's smooth? Do you think it features a disk or does it feature one of these other, other signals right here listed? And while we give folks to a time to chime in, Marc, I've got a question for you. We have a ton of people in the chat who want to know if doctor Marc has recommendatio Oh, that's a cool one.

Well, and of course, you know, there's so many good ones on the market these days. You can get telescopes that, will connect to an app and automatically points to, an object of your choice. And those are great options for people. Wow. I mean, to a backyard telescopes.

We have this great partnership with, with a team called unite, that does a citizen science project around, one of those telescopes called an EV scope. There's also, a less expensive version of that, sort of from a different company that's called C star, like MCE, S. t. a. r.

, and, new ones are coming out all the time, so I may even be out of date. Cool. Thanks, Marc. Now the votes have come in, most people are saying smooth, so let's smash that smooth button. Okay.

Smooth it is. Bam! All right, next up, it's going to ask us some more questions. All right. Is the galaxy merging or disturbed or not?

It could be not disturbed. Right. So galaxies, our galaxy, they're crashing together all the time. And that's where we think big galaxies like ours come from is that they used to be small galaxies and they crash together. So as we look at other galaxies far back in time, which we're doing right now with these James Webb images, right.

We're looking at the galaxies that probably smashed together to form the big things that we live in now. And, so Galaxy merger is galaxy collisions are a huge part of the story of the formation of our galaxy and the history of the universe. So very important question. So we look at this object, do we see any signs of, recent crash or, one of these cataclysms happen sometimes it'll be the spray of stars. It'll kind of, it's getting lost into intergalactic space that you'll see, and, or maybe sometimes just a minor, minor disturbance to the shape of it.

Do you see any signs of these collisions going on? Marc, can you scroll up a little bit? I've got, folks telling me that we can't see the fourth option now. Okay. The fourth option is none to everybody on this, on the stream.

But we also have reality, ripple and a few others saying undisturbed. Folks, now that we can see the fourth option, do we want to go with undisturbed? That makes sense to me. I'm there making lots of noise. See all those kind of, pixels?

Looks like Minecraft or something in the background, right? That's just, noise from, from, the telescope. Oh, Marc, somebody wants to know. We have Joe Mute who wants to know what are the two dots on the bottom middle? That's a good point.

Are those are we able to switch through photos? Why? Thank you. Yeah. Oh, wow.

Thanks, Joe. Minor. Yeah. Great. So, one, special feature of James Webb space Telescope is that it has the ability to detect different wavelengths of light.

Right. And of course, with our eyes, we combine different wavelengths together and we perceive color. But these, different wavelengths tend to be in the near infrared. So there are lots of different ways you can, you know, try to combine these together, interpret them in terms of color, but that nothing is going to correspond exactly the way humans perceive color. So here they're offering us a chance to to view different wavelengths one at a time and see if they offer us any other clues.

Hey, that was a great catch there. Does this give us any other clues about whether there's a merger here or not? I think I'm kind of leaning towards I yeah, I think I'm seeing a lot of people say none in the chat. Let's, let's go with none. None.

Okay. Oh boy. Okay. Lots of options here. Okay.

Is there a ring? Is there a lens or an arc? Often you'll see a, a, A heavy object in space that's in front of another galaxy. So say you had a clump of dark matter or a black hole or something that's in front of a background galaxy. And, because, gravity changes the the the path that light takes.

It'll act as a lens and it'll change the apparent shape of the object. It'll tend to make it into these kind of Einstein rings, or you'll see multiple copies of it, something like that. That's what a lens is. Those are awesome. If you spot one of those, we have irregular objects, dust lanes.

So the Milky Way has, all of its dust in the mid plane that that stars, sometimes you have overlapping objects of your foreground galaxy background. Let me ask you a quick, one. We've got Sandy's on Twitch. He wants to know if we can switch to the other dot again to get that, second type of view. And then we also have a really good question from, B Gibbs, who wants to know what galaxy is this?

Are we trying to figure that out? Do we know which one it is? Or is this just one of those, like, great galaxies that Webb is able to see? I'm going to click okay. Okay.

So I didn't have it here. So not every galaxy is in a catalog just yet. And many of these galaxies that are in that we're looking at in galaxies, you are not yet, you know, named or cataloged. To my question. So, you know, there are more galaxies in the sky than there are stars.

So it's a big project to try to keep track of them all. Okay. What are you doing? I'm seeing. People are saying they're seeing a bit of a disturbance.

Is that an option? For, like, this kind of thing here? Maybe. Yeah. This structure here is.

Yeah. That's questionable. Right. Yeah. Specially since it appears in multiple different visualizations.

Yeah. Multiple different things here. Does that correspond to that? Would we call that a regular or maybe something else? I kind of feeling something else, but what are you guys thinking?

I'm checking the chat. It's hard to tell, you know? It is hard to tell. And. Hey, welcome to science.

Right? You know, if we we've got we've got a helper in the chat to Marc. Yeah, he's got a helper in the chat. Astro. Haley reminded us to check the field guide.

We haven't talked about the field guide yet. On the right of every project that you'll find on zooniverse. org. This is handy tab label field guide, which has examples of things. Yeah.

I think this one is still a little difficult. It's still there. But let's go with something else right now. Yeah, I think I yeah, let's go with something else. Guesstimate there.

Okay. Okay. Now we've got a new one. Hey, Marc. That is really this pixelated or do we never know what we're going to get?

Like could we get some that are a little clearer? It's. Yeah, it's a yeah, it's a game of roulette. You never know what the slot. So, you know, sometimes they're spectacular and clean and and sometimes you're digging deep into the noise, to to find those faint objects.

You know, one exciting thing about looking at a noisy are generally, this probably means the galaxy is faint, which often means that it's very far away. So here is this is what it's like to look back in time. Let's go back in time to see. Wow. That's crazy.

Not really faint like this. Something I want to point out. Is that there's a button on here called Done and Talk. So we've just hit the we hit the done button before, but if you hit done and talk on Zooniverse, it takes you to a new world. So in talk in Zooniverse, there's no way to get there.

So I'll take you there. It's a bulletin board. And the bulletin board you can interact with. Everyone else is looking at these galaxies. So for example, here's Karen Masters, the, the lead science.

So it's like a chat room. It's a chat room. Right. So we can ask we could ask Karen. We could ask other other colleagues.

We could ask, other folks who work on the project what they think. And so maybe, do we have time to keep digging on this one? I think we need to keep it rolling because our poll votes are in, and I am very excited to share it. So right now, though, it looks like we've got a bunch of folks saying disk. So let's go with disk.

Disk. I'm here for disk. I live in a disk. Okay. Is it edge on or is it something else?

You look at some of the other views here. That's tough. Really digging deep into the noise on this one. Yeah, we are. Yeah.

So we say something else or. The people are, say, an edge on. That's another cool way to do the data. See, this is a little, kind of half data. Yeah.

You can flip the color scale. It's kind of nice flip like that. Okay, sweet. Let's go with edge on edge on disk. Marc.

Mark Robert tables wants to know what eventually what eventually will be done with these classifications. Like we're answering all these questions, but then what does that correlate into. Sure. Great question Robert. So science team will look at the the classifications.

First thing you want to know is that, multiple people will look at the same object. So don't ever worry about making a mistake, on Galaxy Zoo, because there are lots of different ways that your input will get checked. So multiple different citizen scientists will view the same object. And those votes will be aggregated into a classification. And then the science team will look at the results and, argue with each other about what they mean, and then they'll write up a paper and they'll go back and forth with an independent, anonymous referee, before that paper is published.

So, so, the next step is, is a lot of people examining the data and, you know, with you actually, so, then one of the, our people on the Galaxy Zoo team who have different interests, they probably have different pet galaxies, different trends that they're interested in following up on. Some folks in the team are interested in galaxies as far as some people want to know about the the merger history. And, and, they even have even seen a paper in the literature already, related to this project with initial results, about the smoothness of galaxies. It the teams already, reporting that they are finding that the galaxies in this population are especially smooth and it may have something to do with the increased abundance of gas as you look back in time. So galaxies, as they crash with each other, they often leave their gas behind in the intergalactic medium.

And so Marc, right now we've got a bunch of questions from folks wondering what the sidebar scientist wants to know. What does the side bar under the left picture do? Great question so far. Oh, okay. So this will play.

And can you scroll up a little bit. Our, our heads are blocking it yet. So yeah. That's good. Or maybe a little.

Yeah. So this is for this exact project and this is Galaxy. Some Zooniverse projects have multiple. In fact, if we look at one of either Backyard Worlds or Daily Minor Planet, it's possible these projects show little movies and so you can control the speed of the movie with that bar. Okay.

Awesome. Thanks, Marc. So we probably need to wrap that wrap this task up soon so we can get to the second tutorial. I'm seeing a bunch of folks in chat say that this looks rounded, so let's go with that. You okay?

Interesting. So you're seeing a bulge in the center of it. It does look a little darker in the center. Folds there. Okay.

I'm not seeing it, but let's go with this round. It actually feels a little boxy to me with a kind of square on the edges, but that may be, in fact, the exposition. Wow. Aren't you glad you don't have to program a computer to try to make these calls? Yeah, yeah.

Okay. So, are there any obvious bright clumps? Now, remember, we're focusing on the object in the center, so we're going to ignore that clumpy thing, whatever that is down there. You see any clumps in here? What's this little thing over here that's in multiple images.

And I see it pop up at different, multiple wavelengths. Makes me think there might be something to it. Do you guys think slightly clumpy? I think we're going to go with no bright clumps. No.

So you showed us the talk option once we. How do we wrap up a project like this. Yeah. So the next question we we're familiar with this one. So which one?

You know, whenever we got done classifying this one, we'd have that option to go to talk and and join the conversation. Or just start looking at other objects and these, You can really dive deep into some of these projects. So when you go into talk, for example, and you have conversations with people who are working on it, often volunteers will form these groups, discussion groups around their favorite objects or trends that they're seeing. So for example, that soon after the original version of Galaxy Z was launched, a group of participants got together and they were seeing these objects, these kind of round, green colored galaxies, and they started calling them green pea galaxies. And they got together and they wrote a paper themselves about the green pea galaxies, which has gone down in the history of, wow, galaxy research.

So, did every one of these projects rabbit hole. It's a rabbit hole. And it's so awesome how you just mentioned how just everyday people can join together, classify objects, and then publish their own papers. So, you know, you just showed us Galaxy Zoo. But for everyone watching, we have over 30 different projects like I mentioned earlier, where if you are interested in auroras, if you're interested in clouds on this planet and others asteroids, you name it, we have it.

So Marc, can we, would you mind actually sharing your screen to show all the projects that we have to offer? And maybe let's talk a little bit about those before I reveal the pole. Awesome. It's like the price is right here it is. You'll see what's behind that door.

What's so fun? Everybody watching is that Marc has no clue what project has won. I'm able to see the chat. This is going to be as much of a surprise for him as it is for, Well, actually, it's he's going to be the only one surprised. So this will be fun.

Okay. It's good. Will be. It will be nice. One surprise the astronomer.

Okay. All right. Fine. So here is the alien minor planet. This is where we look for asteroids, especially near-Earth asteroids.

Keep going. Marc, do you have the main citizen project pay then? I like our science. now. gov/citizen science where we can just show them the whole menu of a project.

They'll have many different projects. Awesome. So while you're scrolling through this, what kind of equipment do people need to participate in these projects? You know, folks were asking about, do they need telescope ops? Do you need anything special to be able to, you know, make a mark like this on this, on the science?

Great question. So the projects that are here at the top of the page are for anyone with a smartphone or laptop. So you can do Galaxy Zoo on your screen. Do not a little screen like this right on the go. Right.

And so, yeah, we also have projects for people who really want to go the wild. We have more specialized projects. So if you have your own telescope, you can join a project like Exoplanet Watch or Unite. And those are both projects that that ask amateur astronomers to study, extrasolar planets, exoplanets. The planets are orbiting other stars.

And you can, do important research on those objects with a backyard telescope. Those teams do some fantastic stuff. There are also projects have a science background to do these projects with NASA. Oh, no, no, no, no, all these projects, all these projects teach you what you need to do. So we just saw in Galaxy Zoo, for example, there's that nice tutorial, and field guide, everything you need to know.

You can also ask other people for help. There's also, by the way, I didn't show you. There's yet another help feature on here. There's the need some help with this task button. So you can go here, say I need help signing.

If there was a major disturbance. Got these great examples. Oh, that is really going to help. That would have helped. Yeah.

We know this now, though. Need some help? Yeah. And if you're stuck. So.

Yeah. So most of these projects set up so that you don't, don't need any background knowledge. One of the, probably the easiest project is a project called Mountain Rain or Snow. So mountain rain or snow sends you a text. You sign up and it sends you a text to your cell phone and, asks you, is it raining or snowing?

And, you say, you say, yeah, it's raining. Or, yeah, it's it's snowing. And that's it. But that's incredibly helpful because we have, you know, the best weather satellites in the world. And, they can they can't always tell exactly what's going on on the ground.

So they could spot the, the the clouds, the the, the radar reflectance of the weather system, but they can't necessarily translate that into exactly what is landing on your windshield right now. So it's a big help to have that additional information if we want to learn how to better predict the weather and understand the climate. So, Marc, before we reveal the pole, reveal what's behind the door. Okay, so you kind of hit on this with talking about the projects, but what science areas can people do NASA science in through these projects like we've talked about Galaxy Zoo so we can do things with astrophysics right in the cosmos, but what else can we do through these project offerings? But science areas?

You'd say sure. So there are citizen science projects in every corner of NASA's science. So we do astrophysics, heliophysics, planetary science with science and, biological and physical sciences, which is experiments that are done, in the environment of space. And that spans an enormous range of things. I mean, we have have projects on, on asteroids, as you saw, we have projects on, This is a this is a project on on phytoplankton.

Right. This is on ice thickness, in Alaska. These are folks who are testing seeds to see whether they'll grow, whether they'll be good food for astronauts. We have, and ham radio operators who are studying the ionosphere. People are studying the depth of water in lakes, which is surprisingly, unknown.

There's a mountain rain or snow project I talked about. We know, Joe, people are building their own wow telescopes and studying Jupiter and the sun. A spectacular. I didn't even know about this until this project appeared online. But there are these things, that appear above thunderstorms called sprites, which are kind of like the up version of lightning.

Right. And that's what that is. So cool. So, you know, you name it, we've we've got a fun project there. And there really is something for everyone.

So folks really encourage you to check out this page, our awesome moderators in the chat. And so Red crew will drop a link. Be sure to go and find the perfect project fit for you! Now it is time to reveal the poll mark. Drumroll please.

And with a 65% of the vote we have, searching for new planets in our solar system has won the poll. So Marc, can you please share your screen and let's hop into the Backyard Worlds project, which I'm super excited that folks chose because, Marc, aren't you a scientist on this project? Like this is a very you're very close to this project. Yeah. So I, before I came to headquarters to to help with the program in general, I, I spent 15 years being, just a regular old astrophysicist, at Goddard Space Flight Center.

And, one project that I that I had the pleasure of starting with some fantastic colleagues, was this one called back our worlds planet nine. So, you start with Adam Schneider and, Erin Meisner, and now, David Kirkpatrick. We all run this project, and it's been just so addictive. Like, I can't describe it any other way. We really can't get enough of working with the team.

And this project has discovered, more than 4000 of these objects called Brown dwarfs. So let me tell you more about the the background. So, surprisingly little about what's, going on beyond, of Neptune. Right. So we only recently figured out that, Pluto is probably not best classified as a planet because there's lots of other objects out there that that resemble Pluto.

But, what we're doing is we're perpetually repeating, in some ways, the experiment that Clyde Tombaugh did to discover Pluto. So he would look at an image of the sky taken one day, another image of it taken a few days later, and he would blink back and forth to search for moving objects. And amazingly enough, to see the end of this, of this little arrow. There, was a little dot, and somehow he recognized that that dot had moved over here in the next, shot. So it's like, so the difference in the photos, it's like a game, right?

That people are from who? So, Yeah. So Clyde Tombaugh found down Pluto that way. And we are going to look for other objects that are using the same system, but instead of visible light, we use infrared light. So it will be sensitive to objects that are, you know, meaning their own thermal radiation.

Right. And, so one example of an object that we could find is the hypothetical object called planet nine and planet nine. The hypothesis comes from this, which is that there are a whole bunch of objects out there that sort of resemble Pluto, and their orbits have patterns in them. They, there are correlations among their orbits which make it look like they've been shepherded by, some kind of massive object that has maybe, you know, six times the mass of planet Earth. Would nicely explain the patterns that we see in the orbits of these other objects called type objects, type of belt objects.

So, we're out there looking for this possible perturbing, right. Planet nine. It would be if we just count in order. But we're also sensitive. Besides this particular hypothesis about Planet nine, while also sensitive to an analog of Saturn out to 28,000 astronomical units beyond 28,000 astronomical units.

So we might see planet ten 1112. Right. If we if we're in the right place at the right time. Yeah. That quick question actually got a quick question from our viewers.

Has of you wants to know, can people use this like projects like this to get into astrophysics as a beginner? Of course. Of course you can. Someone. We'd love it if you'd, if you if we caught your imagination.

And we serve to inspire you, to pursue, you know, deeper studies in astronomy, astrophysics. That would be a big one for us. So, I sure hope so. And, Marc, some of these people, we've had some. Sorry.

I think we were on the set. I was going to ask the same question, like, aren't I? I believe just from working with you, I've heard that, you know, some people that do discover some of these, objects in space don't come from an astrophysics background or a scientific background, but it's through these projects. They were connected with, project scientists or astrophysics communities, and it really kind of was a door into this world. Exactly.

To here and now. More than 500 of our participants have become coauthors, unpublished scientific papers through their work on NASA citizen science projects. We do our best to post them on this web page. I'm going to show you now, oops, where to go? And there we go.

So here we have more than 500 coauthors on papers, and that just delights me to no end. Wow. Awesome. Somebody on this stream? Maybe next.

So be sure to, be sure to check out the projects. And so Marc, with that, folks are super jazzed about this idea about finding Planet Nine. Let's get started. In one of these tasks. How do we, you know, get into it?

Let's do it. Let's get into it. And while you're pulling up the task, we have cobalt. Ethan, who asks, is the hunt for Planet Nine a radar based approach? It is a Ranger request approach, not more practical than an infrared picture based attempt for detection.

Oh, that's that's really a great question. Yeah. So radar has taught us a lot about the solar system. It's great for, interrogating the moon, interrogating your, Earth asteroids. Right.

If you have enough power, you can bounce a signal off of one of these objects and really learn quite precisely what its orbit is. So, the trouble with finding Planet Nine is that, we wouldn't know quite where to point the outgoing beam. Right. So that's it? Could be anywhere in a pretty big, donut kind of space, and you'd be scanning all day.

So instead of doing that, we try to collect light from the object, and people are searching for it in infrared radiation and searching for invisible radiation. And this particular search is an infrared search, so it wins. In the case where the planet had, is especially good at absorbing light or is especially massive. So, so we track, we try all these different techniques. All right.

You know, I mentioned Brown Dwarf on this stream. Brown. Yeah. So, Brown dwarf, is what happens if you have a ball of gas and it's not big enough to sustain nuclear fusion in its center. So, you know, the sun burns because it's steadily combining hydrogen, nuclei into helium nuclei.

But in order to do that, you need certain, pressure. Right. And if your ball of gas isn't big enough, then it it might start some nuclear reaction or other, but it kind of peters out and you don't end up with a star. You end up with a brown dwarf. Yeah.

Wait. Hey, wait, wait a minute. You should be saying that sounds a lot like Jupiter. Jupiter is a ball of gas. It's two.

It's not massive enough to be a star. You'd be right. So, gas giant planets and brown dwarfs, they're kind of, the kind of two ends of the same thing, right? If you had Jupiter and it was around another, and it was out there on its own without a, star, you might consider it a brown dwarf. And likewise, we often, have trouble figuring out when we see a planetary a planet candidate around a star.

Is that a planet? Is that a brown dwarf? The two populations overlap. So, that your planet Nine, has not yet discovered Planet Nine, or you would have heard about it. It would have been on the front page, very paper.

But it has found more than 4000 brown dwarfs, including entire new categories of brown dwarfs. And nobody knew existed before. And this was only we find one today. Okay, so here is what we're going to do. I know I'm fighting at the bit.

Okay, I'm going to smash the join in button, and we're going to dive in and see what we discover. Oops. And I messed up somehow. We're going to match the Get Started button as I was saying, and get going. Okay, so here remember we were talking about how there's this little bar down here and the the go to play button.

So this time I'm going to hit the play button and see what happens because we have a bunch of frames. Remember I talked about how Clyde Tombaugh was studying pictures taken at different times. That's what we're doing here. We got four different shots of the same chunk of Sky in here. We can play them over and over again and I'll just keep this playing.

In fact, I crank up the speed. Does that make you guys happy over there in Twitch Land? I know it's not quite like. What are we looking for? Yeah.

Okay, so. As you can see, there's a whole lot of noise on there. And that's what happens when you stare into deep space. You get a lot of, of, there's a lot of noise you have to go through. But there are also some objects that are clearly not noise.

And that is what we're looking at. That's what we're looking for. We are looking for things that, we refer to as movers or dipoles. And let's look at the examples in the field, guy. And this is a dipole for you see, it flips back and forth.

It's dark on one side. It's light on the other side. They have these great cookies in New York City. They're like chocolate on one side. You know, that's that's what these things remind me of.

If we had one of those, it flip back and forth, it would be a dipole. And then, that's an object. If you see that you're looking at an object that's moving across the sky, kind of moderate speed, if you find something that we call a mover, then you're extra lucky, because now you're looking at an object that's really whipping across space. Here's an example of a really bright mover. This one happens to be red color because it's it's cool.

Extra points for finding cool objects. I'm talking about in temperature. Cool. So this object is close to room temperature and a dipole will look that far. It's probably hot.

It's probably 5 or 6 times room temperature maybe. But here we have an object. A mover marches across the street screen in a straight line. So both a dipole and mover, they're going in a straight line. So if you see something that's kind of like, it's like twisting or it's expanding and contracting or it's changing shape, it's probably not one of these objects.

All right. So is everybody kind of of prepped everybody tuned to look for movers and bikes. Everybody's equipped. We've got Steph. Who wants to know what is a dipole.

Yeah. Let's see if we can find one in this image. Was that your cookie reference. That's the cookie reference right. So it's some of like one and it's like I see one.

So this project has got labels on the axes. So if you see one you could call out the coordinates where you see it. Okay. These are at about 3. 50 and 150 and a little above 45.

12, -45. 12. Is that this sucker you're talking about? Yeah. Is it is the light flipping white and black?

I'm making that up. What do y'all think in the chat? W's in the chat. Yeah 350 top white top right. Cookie in space.

Up right. Cookie in space. What do you think? Yeah. What do you think, Marc?

Yeah, I it's definitely flipping back and forth for me. It's not super clean, like there's some, there's some sort of, like, weird kind of noise or distortion to the shape over here. But yeah, we've got other folks asking about E14. Is that selling you on a dipole? Any chance, see, what is E14 mean?

Can I get, like, a maybe that this number is called the Right ascension. This number is called the declination. I get a right ascension number and a declination number. 3. 42, negative four and 5.

22. -45 degrees. Yeah. Folks are thinking something around that 45 right there. Yeah, it's definitely something going on there also.

That's kind of complicated. Yeah it is. So, Marc, if we need to move on past this task, like, should folks make a, a pointer on a dipole if they are not sure? Or, is is this a project where if we make a marker, even if we're on the fence, it doesn't mess up the data. Yeah.

Oh, you don't have to worry about messing up data on these projects in general, right? Because lots of people will weigh in. Don't be afraid of that. Okay. I think this one is worth calling attention to.

I click okay. And can you scroll up a little bit? Folks can't see the bottom right now. Okay. Get way down so I can more easily click it in every frame.

Okay, everyone, we have one like that. Yeah. And then you know what? There's a bunch. There's bunch more on here.

So I want to call this thing to your attention. Okay. Yeah. See, it's faint, but look how flips back and forth and then mark that sucker up. Marc, we've got and wanting to know if you look in the bottom right corner, but, around 45, 20.

What's that big kind of splash of light. You're going to see it right there. Yeah. Okay. You know what?

You know what we can do? We can. There's a couple ways we can find out more information about this particular image. So this project remember I said these projects are rabbit holes since little I in a circle, if I mash the information. Right.

Yeah. It's going to take me to a bunch of links. Let's go to the wise view link. So wise view is a tool written by a citizen scientists. That's going to show me a different view of the same data and might have whoa patient for us.

Oh my goodness. Is this available. Every project right in well, every project's different. Yeah. I mean, lots of projects have, have other links in them, but this, is unique to this project.

So now we can see what's going on pretty clearly right now. Okay. So what's going to happen okay. No, this is this is just a bright star. So these are the I tried Nostra Diva.

Yeah. So stars are fascinating. And of course this project, most of the objects that are bright enough to have diffraction spikes in this project are things that are already known. But the prizes in this project are, faint. They're often red.

So we're we're really trying to find things that have not yet been discovered here. So I wouldn't get too excited about this one, because I'm pretty sure that it's already in the literature. It's nice. It's nice to spot it again, comfort ourselves. Right.

But if you want to discover your own thing, you want to dig, deeper and look for objects that are fainter. So where was that? That, object that we saw that we've been clicking on here? I think we can find this in the wise view image. That's something.

It was. Yeah, it was somewhere around there. Yeah. It's all it's kind of a triple the objects. You see how in this view it's a lot harder to spot moving things.

It's the same data just visualized a different way. Right. And here this view, really hones in on it really emphasizes objects that are moving. They really stand out and march. You got to that view by clicking the little eye button, right.

Can you show us that one more time? Folks are wondering how they can get to that. Great. A little eye in the circle you see the lion so. And each one of these links will tell you more information about what's going on in the scene.

You can research your favorite object. You can often find out that your object doesn't have any information on it which is great. It's actually you love that right. Yeah. Yeah.

In fact, if you research your favorite object in this, database called Sinbad. And your object that you've clicked on is not in Sinbad, then we really want you to report it. This is kind of, advanced. This is the next level stuff. If you if your object is not in Sinbad, then we love it.

If you would report it by using the think you've got one form. Can I show you the thing? You've got one form. Yeah. Let's do it more.

All right. If you found something interesting and want to learn, if you found something interesting and you want to learn more about it, see the FAQ. You always the FAQ here in the FAQ you will find you think, oh, here's the black and white cookie. You will. So this is what we use if we think we found something new right?

If I think I discovered something, it's great to mark it on the page, but please fill out this form. Here's a form and you can send us. What'll happen is that, if you send if you click on things, we will find out. Every few months we'll go through the click data and and and sort through it. If you fill out the think you've got one form we'll find out faster.

Plus it's going to ask you for more information that will help us make sense of it sooner. So if you think that you've got something that's important and you really want to, get quick answer on it, it's still not quick. Like, compared to like, you know, a video game. Sorry. But, it's it's, it's faster and you can fill out this form, and the science team will will find out faster whether you have a reply.

And you can make a difference, which is so cool here, Marc, I've got I've got about time for one more question. And, I have Sean of a chart, Tania, who asks, how can we as citizen scientists get coauthored in research papers? So can you give us a quick answer to that one? Yeah. There's no one way, the yeah, each project is different, but each one of the projects that we looked at has some way of engaging in a conversation.

So I would do some of the classifications, follow the instructions as best you can, and then go into the the talk boards and have a conversation with the, with the science team. And if there is a form like to think you've got one form, definitely take advantage of that. Daily minor planet has a form like that, so be sure to fill out this form here. So fill out the forms and let the science team know that you're that you're serious. And, as side projects come up, you'll hear about them.

And here's the thing. It's not planned in advance. It's this is science, right? It's it's a roller coaster ride. Yeah.

It's cool if there's dead ends, there's stuff that doesn't go as you planned. There's bad weather, there's a hypothesis. It turns out to be a huge waste of time for everybody. There is, you know, it's it can be rough, but there's also these moments of just. Alexa, see, when you find out that when you get surprised by a result, we can discover something totally new.

And nothing beats the feeling. Absolutely. You know, this is so great, Marc. Thank you for walking us through the citizen science projects today. I mean, as you just mentioned, people really have an opportunity here to not only contribute to science, to really make their own discoveries, to find something in this huge cosmos that is uniquely theirs for one moment until it goes into the science community.

But I just think that is such an amazing thing that you're really cultivating at NASA. And we're so appreciative that you were able to jump on this stream and really show us how anybody can get involved in these projects. So thank you for joining us. Thank you. And, I hope to see you all on line.

One of these talk boards. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Marc. And thanks to for everybody that participated in this stream. This was amazing.

And it was actually so fun too. As somebody that is just doing this with y'all, and I hope you are inspired to go find your own citizen science projects, contribute your own discoveries and data. As Marc mentioned, we have so much data and we it really takes all of us to help really advance humanity's knowledge forward. So these were just two of the many citizen science projects that you can get involved in and participate in at any time, many of them from anywhere from a computer or a phone. And so visit science dot nasa.

gov slash citizen science to see all of the projects again that we went over today. You can also join the global community of volunteers by following do NASA science on X and Facebook. Head on over there you can share stories. You can share findings, and you can really learn from other people doing NASA's science. We are just so excited that you joined us today, and really look forward to all the discoveries you will make.

Thank you and see you next time.

Where this page came from

This page was imported from NASA. NASA material is generally not copyrighted and is in the public domain.

Nobody has written it yet — it is the source material at a new address, which is why search engines are asked to skip it and why no one earns from it. It is up for grabs: take it on, and it is yours to rewrite and to earn from.