Volunteer-Powered Search Doubles Brown Dwarf Census with 3,000 New Discoveries
NASA’s Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 volunteers have essentially doubled the known population of brown dwarfs, adding more than 3,000 discoveries over the last decade from WISE/NEOWISE data via the Zooniverse platform. About 200,000 volunteers contributed, with 61 co-authors among the 75 authors, uncovering rare objects such as extreme T subdwarfs and possible aurorae, improving maps of the galaxy’s mass distribution while the search continues through billions more sources.