Marc Kuchner (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)
Abstract. The DiskDetective.org citizen science project is searching for new planetary systems among the 747 million sources observed by NASA's WISE mission. Disk Detective volunteers have already performed 1.2 million classifications, searching a catalog 8x the size of any similar survey. Relying on the same capabilities of the human visual cortex that help hunters spot prey moving in the tall grass, these volunteers can spot background galaxies and other false positives that computers cannot. But the volunteers have gone far beyond what the website asks them, translating the site into ten different foreign languages, developing their own video tutorials, and researching hundreds of candidate exoplanetary systems in the professional literature to plan follow up observations at six observatories around the world. Come to this talk to hear the news about our discoveries and the remarkable ways our citizen scientists have organized themselves to accomplish more science.
Please bring your laptop or smartphone! (You can come anyway even if you don't have one.)