CITIZEN SCIENCE

For a list of NASA-related CS opportunities, see here.

NASA’s Science Mission Directorate has many opportunities for you to make a meaningful contribution to its scientific endeavors; see: https://science.nasa.gov/citizenscience. For some examples of how these efforts succeed, see: https://science.nasa.gov/get-involved/citizenscience/five-extraordinary-citizen-science-discoveries 

NASA has a website about CS programming you might be interested in. The site “is the hub for series of virtual events designed to provide current, past, and future NASA citizen science program leaders time and community in which to share and learn practices and approaches that lead to successful and rewarding citizen science projects.” Find out all about it at: https://nasacitsci.gmri.org/about-this-site.

CITIZEN SCIENCE SPOTLIGHT

Backyard Spectroscopists: Amateur astronomy equipment has become so good that YOU can make many contributions to astronomical research! The November 2024 issue of Sky & Telescope magazine has a story (page 58) about Austin Kuecher, of the Omaha Astronomical Society, who has been working successfully with the Astronomical League’s Spectroscopy Observing Program and the American Association of Variable Star Observers’ Spectroscopy Section, developing the skills and techniques needed to support front-line astronomical research. You can, too! Check it out! 

Citizen Scientists Find Hypervelocity Star: The Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 Project uses over 80,000 citizen scientists to comb through the mountains of data produced by NASA’s Wide-field Explorer Telescope (WISE) over the 14-year duration of its operation. Several CSers found the unusual star CWISE J124909+362116.0, which is moving at a speed so high that it is likely to escape the Milky Way altogether. The star is an L-class subdwarf star, smaller, cooler, and older than our Sun. Two hypotheses have been proposed for its high speed. The first is that the star was once the close companion of a white dwarf, to which some of the star’s mass was transferred until the white dwarf collapsed and exploded as a supernova, releasing its mass-source companion with a kick of extra speed in the process. The second hypothesis is that the fast star was originally in a globular cluster where it encountered a binary black hole that gave it a huge gravity assist, catapulting it away at great speed. Research is ongoing into the chemical composition of the fast star. If the first hypothesis is correct, astronomers should be able to detect diagnostic chemistry from the white dwarf’s supernova explosion. But they never would have known about the fast star if it weren’t for the team of CSers combing through WISE data! For more on this story, see: https://phys.org/news/2024-08-tracking-newly-hypervelocity-star-citizen.html.

High School Citizen Scientists helped confirm and characterize two exoplanets. “There has never been a better time to be an amateur astronomer. Recent advancements in affordable “smart” telescopes have ushered in a new era of citizen science that blurs the lines between professionals and hobbyists. Career astronomers are especially keen for the assistance of sky-watchers when it comes to the confirmation and characterization of exoplanets. Recently, two citizen scientist groups (some of the members just in high school!) have contributed to academic studies confirming the existence of different planet candidates.” For more information on these successes, see: https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/high-school-citizen-scientists-join-the-hunt-for-exoplanets.

Redshift Wrangler: The Redshift Wrangle project has been in operation for just over one year. It’s 2000+ volunteers made over 143,000 measurements of the red shift of 11,100 different galaxies.

“When you join Redshift Wrangler on Zooniverse, you learn about how astronomers use these spectra to look back in time. These data help reveal the rate at which the galaxies are forming stars, what their chemical compositions are, and how their central supermassive black holes behave. The goal is to assemble a timeline of galaxy formation. There’s still much more wrangling to do!”

Interested in volunteering for to help make the program’s second year even more productive than its first? Find out more at: https://science.nasa.gov/get-involved/citizen-science/happy-birthday-redshift-wrangler.

MoonDiff: NASA’s CS project that allows one to help detect recent changes in the Moon’s surface, such as impact cratering, was mentioned prominently in the story about Amaey Shah in the “Of Special Interest” section above. You can help out, too! Find out more at: https://trek.nasa.gov/moondiff.

Find the Cool Neighbors! Brown dwarfs are the least massive of stars, just barely large enough to initiate fusion in their cores. But they are important in our understanding of star/planet formation and exoplanets (see piece in the News: Astronomy section above). NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite, and its later incarnation as the Near-Earth Orbit WISE or NEOWISE satellite, has amassed a very large body of data that contains evidence of brown dwarfs. But there is a LOT of data to sift through to find them, and that’s where you come in. There is a Zooniverse project out there called Backyard Worlds: Cool Neighbors. Find out more about it at: https://is.gd/cool_neighbors. 

EXOPLANET TRANSITS

Planet Hunters TESS is an ongoing Citizen Science program where YOU can use TESS data to find exoplanets. Read more about the program here. Astronomers at the University of Warwick have set up the “Planet Hunters Next-Generation Transit Search,” an on-line way for you to examine digital images for the tell-tale drop in a star’s light as an exoplanet passes in front of it (the exoplanet “transits” its sun). The Kepler and TESS spacecraft, and other observing programs, have found many exoplanets by using the transit method, but both have a built-in very strong observational bias for larger exoplanets orbiting very close to their sun, rather than a more spread-out system like ours. [Think about it. We rarely see transits of Mercury and Venus, even though they orbit almost in the same plane as Earth. A distant view of our Solar System would require VERY precise alignment, and even then, there would be only one small dip in the Sun’s brightness once a year!]

Automated telescopes, such as those based at the ESO Paranal Observatory in Chile, continuously monitor the sky. Their automated search routines get all of the close-in exoplanets, but might miss transits in systems like our own. That’s where you come in. You can dive right in and start helping with the search. See the link above and/or here for more info.

Transits Help Scientists Understand Distant Planets: File this one under “Astronomers Learn When Things Go in Front of Other Things,” the recent Item of the Week. Exoplanet transits can provided spectral evidence as to the chemical composition of the exoplanet’s atmosphere, and YOU can help can contribute to the study of same, via the Exoplanet Watch and ExoClock citizen science programs. For a summary of the overall effort, see here.The Exoplanet Watch Project, part of NASA’s larger Universe of Learning STEM learning and literacy effort. There are two areas of support you could provide, either using your own telescope to make new observations, or by analyzing already-acquired other data from other sources. Backyard astronomy equipment is now capable of making meaningful observations of exoplanet systems, and if you don’t have your own scope, you can process data from known exoplanets to refine our understanding of their characteristics. If you ever dreamed about finding out more of what’s “out there,” now you can help do just that on the grandest scale! For a summary of this program, see: https://phys.org/news/2023-01-nasa-planets-stars.html.

Finding Nebulae and Asteroids

If Exoplanets are “Small Potatoes” to You, check out how you can assist the search for faint as-yet-undiscovered nebulae. The effort is covered in an article in the upcoming June, 2024, edition of Sky & Telescope magazine, pages 62-67, and in the meantime, check out the Deep Sky Hunters at https://groups.io/g/deepskyhunters.

On the Other Hand, If Your CS Interests are Closer to Home, check out how you and some friends can participate in the search of asteroids in our own Solar System, and remember, if you find them, you get to name them! The program you should check out is affectionally called “Isaac,” the International Asteroid Search Collaboration, at http://iasc.cosmosearch.org, where you can find out all about it. [Note that the URL is “http,” not “https.”] To participate, you will need to form a team of observers (>=2), have access to a Windows computer, and have a good internet connection. They will provide Astronometrica software and telescopic data, you use it to hunt for moving objects. See the FAQ list at: http://iasc.cosmosearch.org/Home/FAQ. You can also find out more about the IASC on page 57 of the November, 2023 issue of Sky & Telescope magazine.

CITIZEN SCIENCE YOU CAN DO

Become a Black Hole Hunter! The Black Hole Hunter program has already had success, with citizen scientists helping find black holes in data from Earth-based telescopes. Now the program is expanding, using data from TESS, and they would like you to help in the effort! You need a smart phone, a tablet/or other computer, a little up-front instruction, and the desire to make a contribution to astronomical research. Find out more about it at: https://phys.org/news/2024-01-citizen-scientists-elusive-black-holes.html.

Asteroid Occultations: Small objects, such as asteroids, will occasionally pass directly in front of a star, causing a temporary drop in light because the starlight is blocked from our view. Such occultations can now be predicted with accuracy because of the tremendous database of star locations from the Gaia satellite. Where the asteroid-caused shadowing of a given star makes a narrow track along the ground akin to that made by the Moon’s shadow during a solar eclipse. If a large number of observers are watching from different locations near that track, each of which has an accurate clock, then the shape of the shadow, hence the shape of the asteroid, can be determined. The September, 2023, issue of Sky and Telescope magazine has an article about a team of “Shadow Chasers,” who have been doing that work (see pages 34-40). This technique, occultation astrometry, was used to determine the dumbbell shape of the KBO Arrokoth, confirmed by the fly-by of it by the New Horizons spacecraft in 2017. Data from this project was used to precisely navigate New Horizons for the fly-by, too! The shapes of the smaller Trojan satellites of Jupiter, the objectives of the upcoming Lucy mission, are being determined with this technique.

There are opportunities for you to help with this research. See the cited article in Sky and Telescope for more information, check out the International Occultation Timing Association (IOTA), and find out more at: https://lucy.swri.edu/occultations.html!

NOTE: The Psyche mission has a number of opportunities for public education and involvement; for more, see: https://psyche.asu.edu/get-involved.

CS SUCCESS STORIES

The Planet Hunters Score(!): A team of astronomers and CSers have discovered the brightest star yet found to have a transiting planet in the “Goldilocks Zone.” Called “TOI 4633c,” the exoplanet is the size of Neptune and orbits its star in 272 days. The system may contain another small star and another exoplanet to boot. For a summary of this find, see here.

AAS Chambliss Award to CSer: Each year, the American Astronomical Society recognizes a citizen scientist who has “contributed significantly to advances in astronomical research.” The AAS held its annual meeting last month, and awarded the Chambliss Amateur Achievement Award to Dan Caselden, for his work in the Backyards Worlds CS projects, where he applied machine learning techniques successfully to the search for ultracool dwarf stars “near” Earth. For more info, see here.

One-of-a-Kind Supernova Remnant Found: A citizen scientist combing through data from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft found a diffuse object in Cassiopeia that was bright in IR but dim in visible light. Dana Patchick flagged it for further study, and that was a good thing, because on more detailed examination it turned out to be the remnant of a supernova observed in China in 1181 CE. It was one of only five supernovae in the Milky Way that was recorded in real-time records. The remnant was unlike that of other supernovae in that it lacks a central star exciting the explosion debris, producing an emission spectrum of hydrogen and helium. Classed as a Type Iax supernova, it may have been formed when two white dwarfs merged. For a summary of the report about this weird object, see: https://phys.org/news/2023-11-amateur-astronomer-one-of-a-kind-supernova-remnant.html; for the abstract of the paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, see here.