Spitzer – A Darker View

Citizen Scientists Lead Astronomers to Mystery Objects in Space

Sometimes it takes a village to find new and unusual objects in space. Volunteers scanning tens of thousands of starry images from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, using the Web-based Milky Way Project, recently stumbled upon a new class of curiosities that had gone largely unrecognized before: yellow balls. The rounded features are not actually yellow — they just appear that way in the infrared, color-assigned Spitzer images.

The center of our Milky Way Galaxy taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech — The center of our Milky Way Galaxy taken by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

“The volunteers started chatting about the yellow balls they kept seeing in the images of our galaxy, and this brought the features to our attention,” said Grace Wolf-Chase of the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. A colorful, 122-foot (37-meter) Spitzer mosaic of the Milky Way hangs at the planetarium, showcasing our galaxy’s bubbling brew of stars. The yellow balls in this mosaic appear small but are actually several hundred to thousands of times the size of our solar system.

“With prompting by the volunteers, we analyzed the yellow balls and figured out that they are a new way to detect the early stages of massive star formation,” said Charles Kerton of Iowa State University, Ames. “The simple question of ‘Hmm, what’s that?’ led us to this discovery.” Kerton is lead author, and Wolf-Chase a co-author, of a new study on the findings in the Astrophysical Journal.

The Milky Way Project is one of many so-called citizen scientist projects making up the Zooniverse website, which relies on crowdsourcing to help process scientific data. So far, more than 70 scientific papers have resulted from volunteers using Zooniverse, four of which are tied to the Milky Way Project. In 2009, volunteers using a Zooniverse project called Galaxy Zoo began chatting about unusual objects they dubbed “green peas.” Their efforts led to the discovery of a class of compact galaxies that churned out extreme numbers of stars.

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Sifting Through the Atmospheres of Far-off Worlds

JPL press release…

HR8799 — Three exoplanets orbiting a young star 140 light years away are captured using Keck Observatory’s near-infrared adaptive optics. Image credit Christian Marois, NRC and Bruce Macintosh, LLNL

Gone are the days of being able to count the number of known planets on your fingers. Today, there are more than 800 confirmed exoplanets — planets that orbit stars beyond our sun — and more than 2,700 other candidates. What are these exotic planets made of? Unfortunately, you cannot stack them in a jar like marbles and take a closer look. Instead, researchers are coming up with advanced techniques for probing the planets’ makeup.

One breakthrough to come in recent years is direct imaging of exoplanets. Ground-based telescopes have begun taking infrared pictures of the planets posing near their stars in family portraits. But to astronomers, a picture is worth even more than a thousand words if its light can be broken apart into a rainbow of different wavelengths.

Those wishes are coming true as researchers are beginning to install infrared cameras on ground-based telescopes equipped with spectrographs. Spectrographs are instruments that spread an object’s light apart, revealing signatures of molecules. Project 1640, partly funded by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., recently accomplished this goal using the Palomar Observatory near San Diego.

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Kepler Gets a Little Help From Its Friends

JPL press release…

Kepler’s follow-up observers confirm new discoveries

More than 2,300 exoplanet candidate discoveries have made it the most prolific planet hunter in history. But even NASA’s Kepler mission needs a little help from its friends.

KIC 4862625 — An artist’s illustration of an exoplanet system. Credit: Haven Giguere/Yale

Enter the Kepler follow-up observation program, a consortium of astronomers dedicated to getting in-depth with the mission’s findings and verifying them to an extremely high degree of confidence.

A single Kepler observation alone is often not enough to prove that the telescope has found an exoplanet, said Nick Gautier, the mission’s deputy project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., who coordinated and continues to help run Kepler’s robust follow-up program.

Kepler finds exoplanets by watching for worlds that move directly between the telescope and their host stars. As they do this, they block a tiny fraction of the star’s light, an event astronomers call a “transit.”

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