Citizen Science Salon is a partnership between Discover and SciStarter.org.
Sometimes the old methods truly are the best methods. When astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto in 1930, it was the result of countless hours spent straining his eyes at a machine called a blink comparator. Using it, Tombaugh could flip rapidly back and forth between two images of the night sky taken at slightly different times.
A NASA citizen science project called Backyard Worlds asks volunteers to do much the same thing, if virtually. Volunteers comb through images of our celestial neighborhood, looking for new worlds near to us, just like Tombaugh. But instead of planets, they’re now looking for something even stranger. The search today is focused on a strange class of objects known as brown dwarfs — not quite planets, not quite stars.
