(Photo : Youtube)

Advertisement

Like Us on Facebook

Join the search for new worlds in the outer reaches of our solar system and in nearby interstellar space at Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 (Youtube)

A new initiative by NASA called "Backyard Worlds: Planet 9" lets the public search for possible undiscovered worlds in the outer reaches of the solar system and in neighboring interstellar space. The project is aimed at finding the yet-undetected "Planet Nine", a hypothetical planet in the outer Solar System beyond Neptune, and relies on human eyes to find and flag ''interesting'' objects from NASA's all-sky data.

The project's website lets everyone participate in the search by viewing brief movies made from images captured by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission which highlight objects that have gradually moved across the sky.

According to the lead researcher Marc Kuchner, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, there are only four light-years between Neptune and Proxima Centauri, the nearest star, and much of this vast territory is unexplored because of so little sunlight that even large objects in this region barely shine in visible light. However, "by looking in the infrared, WISE may have imaged objects we otherwise would have missed," said Kuchner.

Between 2010 and 2011, WISE scanned the entire sky producing the most comprehensive survey at currently available mid-infrared wavelengths. After its primary mission, WISE was shut down in 2011 but was reactivated in 2013 with a new mission to identify potentially hazardous near-Earth objects (NEOs), which are essentially asteroids and comets in the vicinity of Earth's orbit. 

The new website uses this data to search the unknown objects in and beyond the solar system. In 2016, Caltech in Pasadena, California, showed that many distant solar system objects possessed orbital features indicating they were influenced by the gravity of a yet-undetected planet, which the researchers nicknamed "Planet Nine", and the planet also known as Planet X exists and is as bright as some predictions, it could show up in WISE data, said NASA on its website.

The search may also result in the discovery of more distant objects like brown dwarfs in nearby interstellar space.

People around the world can work their way on the website through millions of "flipbooks", brief animations showing how small patches of the sky changed over several years. Moving objects which have been flagged by participants are prioritized by the science team for follow-up observations by professional astronomers. Participants also get to share credit for their discoveries in any scientific publications that result from the project.

Visit the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 website here and to know more about the mission, visit NASA's WISE page here.