NASA | Disk Detective | 2016 Oct 21
[img3="Artist’s concept of the newly discovered disk around red dwarf AWI0005x3s.Via a NASA-led citizen science project, eight people with no formal training in astrophysics helped discover what could be a fruitful new place to search for planets outside our solar system – a large disk of gas and dust encircling a star known as a circumstellar disk.
Credits: Jonathan Holden/Disk Detective"]http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files ... ropped.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]
A paper, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters and coauthored by eight citizen scientists involved in the discovery, describes a newly identified red dwarf star, AWI0005x3s, and its warm circumstellar disk, the kind associated with young planetary systems. Most of the exoplanets, which are planets outside our solar system, that have been imaged to date dwell in disks similar to the one around AWI0005x3s.
The disk and its star are located in what is dubbed the Carina association – a large, loose grouping of similar stars in the Carina Nebula approximately 212 light years from our sun. Its relative proximity to Earth will make it easier to conduct follow-on studies. ...
Since the launch of NASA’s Disk Detective website in January 2014, approximately 30,000 citizen scientists have performed roughly two million classifications of stellar objects, including those that led to this discovery. Through Disk Detective, citizen scientists study data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer mission (WISE), the agency’s Two-Micron All Sky Survey project (2MASS), and other stellar surveys. ...
Found: Oldest Known Planet-Forming Disk
Carnegie Institution for Science | 2016 Oct 21
A New M Dwarf Debris Disk Candidate in a Young Moving Group Discovered with Disk Detective - Steven M. Silverberg et al
- Astrophysical Journal Letters 830(2):L28 (2016 Oct 20) DOI: 10.3847/2041-8205/830/2/L28
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1610.05293 > 17 Oct 2016