Scientists helped NASA find ancient circumstellar disk
American astrophysicists together with a group of citizen scientists discovered a circumstellar disk age of about 45 million years. The results are published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, according to Naked Science.
“Found the circumstellar disk rotating around a red dwarf AWI0005x3s in the Carina nebula. It is not excluded that the spectral class of the star corresponds to Proxima Centauri (M5.5 Vе). The age of red dwarf are unknown, but he is a candidate to the Association of the Keel, objects which, according to modern ideas, must be the same age and occurred about 45 million years ago”, – writes the edition.
Typically, the evaporation of the circumstellar disks of this kind occurs in less than 30 million years. The causes of “longevity” disk AWI0005x3s not specified. It is expected that the proximity of an object to the Ground (about 8 thousand light-years) to facilitate further study. The disk might be exoplanets — most of them previously were found in such clusters.
To detect the drive managed through the joint efforts of scientists and eight volunteers. The latter analyzed a ten-second video NASA project Disk Detective. The participants klassificeret space objects, images were obtained with telescopes of the WISE and 2MASS review — it involved telescopes in the Northern and southern hemispheres.
Since the launch of the project in 2014 was attended by 30 thousand civilian scientists. Just made 2 million classifications. During this time, the WISE telescope has recorded 747 million space objects, several thousand of them, scientists believe, may be circumstellar disks. According to the authors, without the help of volunteers the last discovery would have been impossible.
