They are a huge clump of matter composed of gas, dust and fragments of planets, in orbit around a star. So far, astronomers have only found disks no older than 30 million years old. This discovery is doubly special because it relied on a find by “citizen scientists” as part of a project called Disk Detective, led by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Goddard Space Flight Centre. Citizen scientists make their finds by viewing ten-second videos of data from NASA surveys, including the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission and Two-Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) projects. Since the launch of the website in January 2014, roughly 30,000 citizen scientists have participated in this process, performing roughly two million classifications of celestial objects.

Source: The Hindu October 23, 2016 00:33 UTC