PLANET 9: NASA is inviting the public to “help scan the realm beyond Neptune for brown dwarfs and planet nine” in a new online project.
According to NASA, in 2016, researchers at the California Institute of Technology announced that they discovered evidence of a large ninth planet in the outskirts of the solar system.
Simply called “Planet Nine” or “Planet X,” the planet — if it exists — “could have a mass about 10 times that of Earth and orbit about 20 times farther from the sun on average than Neptune. It may take between 10,000 and 20,000 Earth years to make one full orbit around the sun.”
And you thought Bradford’s winters were long.
A NASA-funded website — Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 — invites everyone to help in the search for objects such as Planet Nine. Participants will be asked to look at short movies “made from images captured by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission.”
NASA explains that WISE scanned all of the sky between 2010 and 2011.
“On the website, people around the world can work their way through millions of ‘flipbooks,’ which are brief animations showing how small patches of the sky changed over several years,” the agency explained. “Moving objects flagged by participants will be prioritized by the science team for follow-up observations by professional astronomers. Participants will share credit for their discoveries in any scientific publications that result from the project.”
Take part at backyardworlds.org, which is a project page on zooniverse.org. We’ve never heard of Zooniverse until this, but if you’re interested in helping with research projects on a variety of subjects, this is a good online community for you.
Collaborating on the project with NASA and Zooniverse are University of California, Berkeley; the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Arizona State University in Tempe and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
If any of you are reading this wondering, “I thought Pluto was the ninth planet,” it was.
That is, it was until 2006, when it was downgraded from a “planet” to a “dwarf planet.” This was the year the International Astronomical Union settled on a definition of “planet.”
Pluto did not meet one of the three criteria: it has not “cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit,” which happens when a body is the gravitationally dominant body in the orbit.
Pluto is one of five dwarf planets now recognized in our solar system.
