Overlooked Exoplanet Found by Citizen Scientists

A massive planet or brown dwarf, 1600 AU from its star, was found by citizen scientists in the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project.

IMAGE: At left, the NASA WISE image of the BD+60 1417AB system. At right bottom is the host star and companion, and at top right is a zoom-in on the new low-mass world. The image is a color-composite from multiple WISE bands. CREDIT: Backyard Worlds collaborator Léopold Gramaize

During a post-show Q&A the other day, we discussed how the only exoplanet stories we’re getting these days are about the wildest and weirdest planet discoveries. There’s a reason for that. We’ve found nearly 5,000 exoplanets, and the discoveries had gotten to the point where the press releases announcing them became so common that no one was really paying attention to them anymore. Once unusual and exciting, exoplanets are now pretty commonplace. Which has brought us to where the announcements are now about planets with strange orbits or unusual sizes, such as the ones that orbit in less than a day or are Mars-sized.

Today’s press release is no different in that regard. A new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal details the discovery of a massive exoplanet that could be a brown dwarf, orbiting at a huge distance from its star: over 1,600 astronomical units away. Remember, an astronomical unit is the average distance from the Earth to the Sun, so this giant of a planet is 1,600 times farther away. We haven’t found a lot of planets at that type of distance from their host stars.

Now, one of the coolest pieces of this story is that this particular exoplanet was discovered by a volunteer citizen scientist looking at data in the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project. Jörg Schümann noticed that a particular object was moving in tandem with a star. Other searches had missed the planet because of that huge distance between the planet and star. Lead author Jackie Faherty explains: This star had been looked at by more than one campaign searching for exoplanet companions. But previous teams looked really close to the star. Because citizen scientists really liked the project, they found an object that many of these direct imaging surveys would have loved to have found, but they didn’t look far enough away from its host.

This project is not one of those “look at light curves and flag dips” projects where we are dealing with exoplanet transits. Backyard Worlds uses data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission, and citizen scientists look…