It's not only professional astronomers who make amazing discoveries about space -- sometimes enthusiastic amateurs make impressive scientific discoveries too.
It’s not only professional astronomers who make amazing discoveries about space — sometimes enthusiastic amateurs can make impressive scientific discoveries as well. Recently citizen scientist Frank Kiwy used publicly available data to discover 34 new ultracool dwarf binary systems located near our solar system.
A binary system is a type where two stars orbit each other. And a brown dwarf is an object between a star and a planet — cooler than a star but hotter than a planet. They don’t have nuclear fusion going on inside them, which is how stars produce their heat, but they are similar to what happens to a star as it cools. There weren’t that many brown dwarf binaries known before this discovery, so the finding has significantly increased the pool of brown dwarf binaries which can now be studied.
“The Backyard Worlds project has fostered a diverse community of talented volunteers,” said Meisner, who is also co-founder of Backyard Worlds. “150,000 volunteers across the globe have participated in Backyard Worlds, among which a few hundred ‘super users’ perform ambitious self-directed research projects.”