Citizen Science Salon is a partnership between Discover and SciStarter.org.
How long does it take planets to form in solar systems? Since 2014, tens of thousands of volunteers have helped NASA try to answer this question by looking at telescope images of solar systems as their protoplanetary disks are still forming.
NASA’s Disk Detectives is a citizen science project that enlists members of the public to help analyze data. It was designed to discover disks of gas, rock and dust circling other stars. These structures appear early on in planet formation. So, peering into a planetary disk is like looking at a baby photo of a future solar system.
“We’re trying to understand how long it takes for planets to form,” astrophysicist Marc Kuchner said in a NASA release. Kuchner is the Disk Detective project lead at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the Citizen Science Officer ...
