Astro enthusiasts will help find remnants of planetary systems in dead stars

Astro enthusiasts will help find remnants of planetary systems in dead stars

The scientific research center NOIRLab has launched the Exoasteroids project. In this context, volunteers will help astronomers find white dwarfs surrounded by the remnants of destroyed planetary systems.

NSF NOIRLab has launched Exoasteroids, a citizen science project aimed at identifying asteroids orbiting white dwarfs in the Milky Way.

When the sun exhausts its hydrogen reserves, it begins to expand and becomes a red giant. In the process, our star will destroy Mercury, Venus and possibly the Earth. Next, the dying sun will shed its upper atmosphere and a cooling core will remain, surrounded by debris and surviving planets.

Similar processes have occurred and will continue to occur in other star systems. Astronomers know of a number of white dwarfs surrounded by dust disks containing asteroids. They are excellent natural laboratories for studying the final stages of planetary systems and provide unique information about the formation and death of planets.

To help scientists find examples of asteroids orbiting white dwarfs in the Milky Way, the NOIRLab center has launched the Exoasteroids project. Its purpose is to identify white dwarfs that have changed in brightness over the past decade. Such oscillations could indicate that the white dwarf is surrounded by the remnants of a planetary system and is still actively destroying exoasteroids. This results in flares that can be seen in images from modern telescopes.

A white dwarf in an artistic representation. Source: NASA, ESA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI)

The project’s website contains thousands of videos of white dwarfs captured by the WISE space telescope. Volunteers will review these videos to distinguish real-world cases of white dwarf brightness changes from interference such as overlapping sources or detector noise.

According to the project’s authors, humans can do a better job than computer algorithms. The fact is that white dwarfs with true infrared variability are rare. This means that automated searches are likely to return significantly more incorrect identifications than correct ones.

The Exoasteroids project is implemented on the citizen science platform Zooniverse. To participate you must click on the following link.

Previously we told you how ESA asked for volunteers to help classify galaxies.