Backyard Worlds: Binaries asks volunteers to find brown dwarfs

Most stars in the Milky Way exist in groups, including pairs or binaries where two objects orbit one another. Some binaries pair a star with a brown dwarf — a gas ball more massive than a planet but too small to sustain nuclear fusion. Finding brown dwarfs in pairs helps scientists infer their ages and origins.

Backyard Worlds: Binaries invites volunteers to examine images from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) to spot these systems. Volunteers learn to recognize binaries and brown dwarfs in short animations, then click buttons to indicate whether an image contains a binary and whether it includes a brown dwarf.

Participants can review as many image sets as they like and discuss finds in the Talk forum. Getting started requires a web-connected device and about 5–15 minutes to complete the tutorial; no prior knowledge is needed because the in-project tutorial provides all instruction.

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