Backyard Worlds: Planet 9- The Digital Flipbook

Context

Cold new world near solar system found by scientists

Backyard Worlds: Planet 9- The Digital Flipbook

• It is a free online project that lets anyone browse through images by NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft.
• It is a part of Zooniverse.

• Zooniverse is a citizen science web portal owned and operated by the Citizen Science Alliance.
• It has headquarters at Oxford University and the Adler Planetarium.
• The Zooniverse hosts a number of projects from fields of astronomy, ecology, cell biology, humanities, and climate science.
  

  ---

• Backyard Worlds was launched in February 2017.
• Few days after the launch of Backyard Worlds website, Bob Fletcher an Australian, identified a very faint object moving across the WISE images.
• This object came to be known as “Bob’s Dwarf”. Studies revealed that it was a brown dwarf.

What is Brown Dwarf?

• Brown dwarfs are objects which have a size between that of a giant planet like Jupiter and that of a small star.
• The mass of the brown dwarfs, according to many scientists range from 15 times the mass of Jupiter to 75 times the mass of Jupiter.
• Given that range of masses, the object would not have been able to sustain the fusion of hydrogen like a regular star; and hence are often termed by scientists as “ failed stars”
• Brown dwarfs spread all across the Milky Way and is useful in studying the atmosphere of other worlds because of their striking similarity with Jupiter.

Significance of the Backyard World’s Project

The project would help to map our celestial neighborhood