hidden solar system object
Are There More Planets? NASA Seeks Hidden Solar System Objects With Backyard Worlds Project
NASA needs help finding space objects, so the government agency teamed up with astronomy site Zooniverse for a new project that will recruit the public to help aid in the search for hidden planets and other solar system objects beyond Neptune. The NASA-funded project, named Backyard Worlds: Find Planet 9, launched on Zooniverse Wednesday. Participants in the project will search through data collected by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and separate actual celestial objects like brown dwarfs and low-mass stars from image artifacts that can sometimes appear to be real objects, referred to as false positive. WISE has pumped out hundreds of thousands of images but the computer system was unable to determine actual space object from image errors. "Spiky images of stars, especially variable stars, are everywhere. Worse, are the optical ghosts, blurry blobs of light that have been scattered around inside WISE's instruments. These can hop back and forth, or even change color. These artifacts can easily fool our image processing software," Zooniverse said in a statement.