Go ahead and wave out into the universe. We should make our 95 newly discovered brown dwarf neighbors feel welcome.
The NASA-funded Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project used the volunteer powers of citizen scientists to search satellite and space telescope data in search of new space objects that we previously missed. You found a lot.
An article due for publication this week in the Astrophysical Journal describes 95 cool brown dwarfs spotted by the project.
Brown dwarfs, sometimes called "failed stars", exist in an underworld between planets and stars. "Brown dwarfs do not have the mass necessary to keep nuclear reactions running in their core and are similar to cooling embers," the National Science Foundation told NOIRLab in a press release Tuesday.
Some of the brown dwarfs spotted in the data have temperatures close to those on Earth and could even have water clouds. These cool temperatures also make it difficult to find these particular brown dwarfs. The project's volunteers looked for pixels in telescope images that indicate the movement of space objects.
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"Despite the capabilities of machine learning and supercomputers, there is no substitute for the human eye when it comes to searching telescope images for moving objects," NASA said in a press release on Tuesday. Twenty of these citizen scientists are listed as co-authors on the paper. NASA called it "the largest published sample of these objects ever discovered by a Citizen Science project".
These brown dwarfs are close enough to our solar system to be considered part of our cosmic neighborhood. "This paper is proof that the solar neighborhood is new territory and citizen scientists are great astronomical cartographers," said co-author Jackie Faherty, an astronomer with the American Museum of Natural History.
This might be a good time to nod Mr. Rogers: It's a beautiful day in the cosmic neighborhood.
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