A Potential New Hunting Ground for Exoplanets

Via a NASA-led citizen science project, eight people with no formal training in astrophysics helped discover what could be a fruitful new place to search for planets outside our solar system – a large disk of gas and dust encircling a star known as a circumstellar disk.

Artist’s concept of the newly discovered disk. Image credit: Jonathan Holden/NASA

A study describes a newly identified red dwarf star, AWI0005x3s, and its warm circumstellar disk, the kind associated with young planetary systems.

Most of the exoplanets, which are planets outside our solar system, that have been imaged to date dwell in disks similar to the one around AWI0005x3s.

The disk and its star are located in what is dubbed the Carina association – a large, loose grouping of similar stars in the Carina Nebula approximately 212 light years from our sun. Its relative proximity to Earth will make it easier to conduct follow-on studies.

Most disks of this kind fade away in less than 30 million years. This particular red dwarf is a candidate member of the Carina association, which would make it around 45 million years old. It's the oldest red dwarf system with a disk we've seen in one of these associations.

Since the launch of NASA’s Disk Detective website in January 2014, approximately 30,000 citizen scientists have performed roughly two million classifications of stellar objects, including those that led to this discovery.

Through Disk Detective, citizen scientists study data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer mission (WISE), the agency’s Two-Micron All Sky Survey project, and other stellar surveys. (NASA)

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