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Citizen scientists help create most complete 3D map of brown dwarfs in Milky Way
Telescopes can detect brown dwarfs because they emit heat in the form of infrared light, left over from their formation.
Jan 25, 2021 19:28:31 IST
Citizen scientists from NASA-funded Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 have now managed to create the most complete three-dimensional map of 525 brown dwarfs in our cosmic Milky Way neighbourhood. The brown dwarfs are objects that are balls of gas not heavy enough to be stars, since they cannot power themselves through nuclear fusion the way stars do, according to a
statement from NASA. While they are named brown dwarfs, they appear magenta or orange-red if a person could see them close up.
A group of volunteers and professional scientists have created a new 3D map of where the closest brown dwarfs to our sun are located. This is actually the most complete map ever created of brown dwarfs in our solar system’s “neighborhood”.
Brown dwarfs are objects that are too big to be classified as planets and too small to be categorized as stars. Since they are so faint and somewhat small in size, they are pretty hard to find so the experts needed as much help as they could get in order to find them. The volunteer “citizen scientists” and professional scientists were part of a NASA-funded project named “Backyard Worlds: Planet 9” where they found and mapped out hundreds of brown dwarfs that are all within 65 light-years away from our sun (approximately 400 trillion miles) and their distances were confirmed by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.