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. “But with your powerful human eyes, you can help us recognize real objects of interest that move among these artifacts.”

Citizen scientists participating in the project will investigate images beyond Neptune’s orbit for objects in a solar belt called the Kuiper Belt, which contains a few dwarf planets as well as Pluto. Researchers were also hoping someone will help them find another planet that could be in the sun’s orbit between Promixma Centauri, the closest star to the sun, and Neptune.

“There are just over four light-years between Neptune and Promixma Centauri, the nearest star, and much of this vast territory is unexplored,” Marc Kuchner, a NASA Goddard Space Flight Center astrophysicist said in a statement. “Because there's so little sunlight, even large objects in that region barely shine in visible light. But by looking in the infrared, WISE may have imaged objects we otherwise would have missed."

Wise was first launched in 2010 and scanned the sky until 2011. The system was reactivated in 2013 and has aided NASA’s efforts to find potentially hazardous near-Earth objects like asteroids and comets.

The public project comes just days after NASA completed its crowdsource space poop challenge, which asked citizens to design an innovative waste management system that could be used by astronauts in space on missions lasting up to 144 hours or six days.