NASA is asking the public to help scour the sun’s backyard for hidden cosmic companions. A new citizen science campaign, part of the ongoing Backyard Worlds project, aims to uncover brown dwarfs — objects too massive to be planets but not massive enough to ignite as stars.
Brown dwarfs paired with stars offer a rare window into age determination, a notoriously difficult measurement in astronomy. By analyzing images from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission, volunteers can spot the subtle motion of these elusive objects against a static background of distant stars.
The effort focuses on the sun’s immediate stellar neighborhood, where the nearest such pairs may lurk undetected in existing data. Participants do not need any formal training; the platform provides interactive tools to compare time-lapse images and flag moving points of light.
Astronomers are eager for new discoveries because age is a crucial parameter for understanding brown dwarf evolution and planetary system formation. The project has already led to the identification of thousands of candidate objects, many of which have been confirmed by follow-up observations.
Some researchers caution that citizen science data can introduce false positives, and all candidates require rigorous verification with professional telescopes. Despite that limitation, the approach dramatically broadens the search space compared to what professional astronomers could cover alone.