NASA 公民科学，实现太阳能社区普查

NASA's Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 citizen science project has produced a new census of over 4,000 cosmic objects within 65 light-years of the sun, revealing that there are four times more stars than brown dwarfs in this region. The average mass of an object in this area is found to be 40% of the mass of the sun, and it is suggested that the process of forming brown dwarfs differs from that of higher-mass stars.

Citizen scientists played a crucial role in this research, significantly accelerating the identification process and making the project more efficient. Through the Backyard Worlds initiative, volunteers provided valuable input on identifying nearby objects by observing their movement relative to the background in sets of images. Additionally, a tool called WISE View was developed using images from NASA's WISE mission, allowing for the easy stitching together of images into animations, which were then used by a larger group of volunteers to identify moving objects.

J. Davy Kirkpatrick, the lead author of the study, emphasized the significant contribution of citizen scientists and highlighted the development of the Stellar Ambassadors program, through which volunteers helped review scientific literature on these objects. Furthermore, the study introduced Léopold Gramaize, a citizen scientist who co-discovered several brown dwarfs and contributed to the scientific literature review. Gramaize, who previously had no knowledge of brown dwarfs, learned coding to expedite his search through astronomical databases.

Looking ahead, the next phase of research will involve examining data from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to further understand the differences between the seeds of stars, brown dwarfs, and planets within molecular clouds. This ongoing collaboration between professional scientists and citizen scientists demonstrates the power and potential of public engagement in advancing our understanding of the cosmos.