NASA has announced a unique detection of the closest "failed star" of the planet, located only 332 light years away, which will allow a better future study of the nature of these strange objects.
Failed stars
"Failed stars" is a term used to express brown dwarfs, a special condition that is neither stars nor planets, and is so called because it possesses the same mechanism by which stars are created, in which parts of gas and dust accumulate in space on each other.
But in the case of brown dwarfs, the mass of that cloud that originated from it was not large enough to start a nuclear fusion, which means that it failed to become young stars.
Brown dwarfs remain hot - due to friction between their components - for a period spanning billions of years, and then the surface temperature decreases slowly until they become black dwarfs, and this is the final stage of their life.
According to the new study announced at the American Astronomical Society meeting on June 2, the first to arrive at this new revelation is not a team of scientists, but rather one of the teams involved in a new electronic game called "Disk Detect."
Scientific games and research
Participants in this online game are aiming to scan millions of images from the large-scale infrared survey explorer in the infrared (WIS) domain of NASA.
During these exams, game participants search for the stars around which planetary disks have formed.
According to the new study, immediately after the discovery of the existing planetary disk around the new brown dwarf in 2016 - called "W1200-7845" - a research team from the University of Oklahoma and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology focused more on it via the Magellan telescopes of the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile.
Because this is a rare case, the team hopes to complete more studies of this brown dwarf through the "Large Atomic Array Observatory Matrix" (ALMA), to see its mass and radius and to study how planets can form around these strange celestial bodies.
New discoverers
This is not the first time that amateurs have participated in purely scientific discoveries. For example, Millivia Tifeno - a German abyss - was able to discover the coldest and oldest white dwarf we know so far, and the results of this disclosure were published last February in the "The Astrophysical Journal" Leters. "
Milivia found this star while participating in a similar electronic game whose purpose was to inspect the archives of the European Space Agency's "Gaia" telescope, but was primarily looking - like the "Disc Detect" staff - for brown dwarfs.
As for the Russians, Ivan Terentiv and Tim Matalini, in May 2016 we were able to observe a huge gathering of galaxies that was hidden from the eyes of scientists about a billion light-years away from us and containing forty galaxies.
This happened while they were practicing a similar electronic game called "Galaxy Zoo", and a research paper for this disclosure was published in the monthly bulletin of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Amateurs involved in such projects are called "Citizen Scientist", and projects such as "Zonefers" - which participates with NASA in this initiative - aim to integrate the general public into the scientific process in order to achieve a better understanding of the huge data that Earth Observatories publish And varied space.