 Hi, welcome to the January webinar of the NASA Night Sky Network. This month we welcome Mark Kushner to our webinar who share with us opportunities for you to get involved in contributing to NASA science. Mark Kushner is an astrophysicist and the citizen science officer for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. His job is to foster citizen science at NASA. He oversees a portfolio of around 30 NASA-funded citizen science projects reaching more than a million people. He also serves as the principal investigator of the Zooniverse Citizen Science Projects Disdetective in Backyard Worlds. Mark is a bachelor's degree in physics from Harvard and his PhD in astronomy is from Caltech. He's also studied at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and at Princeton University as a Hubble Fellow. Other than citizen science, Mark is known for imaging of disks on exoplanets for which he received an early career achievement award from SHPE, SBIE, the International Society for Optics and Photonics in 2009. So please welcome Mark Kushner. Here he is. Hey, everybody. Hey, Mark. You hear me all right? We do. Thanks so much for having me, Brian, and Dave, and Vivian. Shall I start my slides? Yep. It's all on you. And we'll, if we have any questions, so do, don't wait until the end for putting your questions in. Mark wants to see them as we go. So don't be shy about putting those questions in the Q&A window. So we'll talk to you soon. We were having such a fun chat before that I let my slides get all mangled. I'm going to backtrack a bit and reshare. Can you all see that? Not yet. I would just see you at the moment. Yeah. There we go. There we go. Yay. Okay. So there's... All right. Looks perfect. Hot diggity. Hi. I'm Dr. Mark Kushner. I'm a NASA citizen science officer. And I spend part of my time at Goddard as Brian was saying, Goddard Space Flight Center. And part of the time now, working at headquarters, trying to learn the insides and outs of science policy and things like that, and make more opportunities for citizen science. And by citizen science, well, you'll hear many definitions of citizen science. And for the most part, I ignore them because I work in the science mission director at NASA. And all we do is awesome NASA science. So that makes my task very simple. My job is to do science with volunteers. So citizen science to me means NASA science, awesome NASA science with help from volunteers. You call it volunteer science, you could call it community science, you could call it amateur science. You get the idea. Anyway, the position's only been around for about a year. I'm new to the job. But hey, now we have an officer at NASA headquarters. I'm your representative in NASA. So it's great to meet you in this special Zoom world that we're in right now. And I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts and questions as we continue. I have to start with a big thank you. Even though I haven't met you personally, I know that some of you out there are already doing citizen science. I count you as my professional colleagues. And there aren't very many opportunities for us at NASA to say thank you. So thank you. So Mark, we have a very early question here. And so we have Susan asks, is there a citizen science officer at JPL? Or I guess that's a good question. Is there a citizen science officer at any of the field centers that people can access? Or do we just potentially reach out directly to you? Thanks. So one thing I learned just now is that I can't see the questions. So Brian, please do continue to pass them along. As far as I know, I'm the only one for all of NASA, though there are certainly citizen science projects underway at several of the NASA centers. There are some projects that are led at JPL, others at Goddard, some at Ames. There are some at, I'm aware of, participants from one or two of the other field centers. Not every center is attached to a project, there's someone at Glenn, there's someone at Johnson who's working on something, but I might be it for now. Feel free to reach out to me. So for the next 45 minutes or so, if you choose to hang out with me, you'll endure first my bragging about NASA citizen science. Then you'll hear about awesome astronomy projects, and then I'm going to ask for your help brainstorming about how we can bring together amateur astronomers and NASA scientists beyond this webinar. In particular, I have something I'd like to ask your opinion about the notion of maybe a conference bringing together people to meet in person. Let the bragging begin. NASA funded citizen science projects have discovered 400,000 Martian seasonal fans, 54,000 circular discs, 18,000 mosquito weeding sites, 1,200 brown dwarfs, six interstellar dust grains, four new meteorites, and a new kind of aurora, and we will all write the second verse of that together. Most NASA citizen science projects save lives. For example, Landslide Reporter is helping us build a better inventory and better models of landslides, so we will maybe one day be able to predict them. Mosquito habitat mapper is helping protect us from malaria. Most NASA citizen science projects have yielded surprises. I would say our best results from citizen science so far have generally been things that weren't part of the plan. So scientists poses a question, builds an elaborate project, says help me do this particular task, and guess what? The best discovery is something that wasn't planned, that the science team didn't think of, that either citizen scientists, serendipitously spotted a little data, came up with a side project they wanted to do. That's part of the fun of it. So NASA funded citizen science projects have now discovered most of the long period extra solar planets, most of the known comets, the oldest white dwarf with a disk, the oldest planet forming disk, the dipper star phenomenon, and the new kind of aurora. And that on the lower right corner there is a coin with a picture of the new kind of aurora on it, by the way, discovered by citizen scientists. 116 of our NASA citizen scientists, that's me tapping on my computer because I'm excited, have become named co-authors on scientific papers. I'm talking about your name is on the paper. This is not to mention many more folks who have been mentioned in posters, conference proceedings, acknowledged in papers, mentioned as collectives. I'm talking about 116 folks who are named co-authors. And those papers we know are well cited. So I don't have the NASA specific statistics, but multiple studies now have shown that papers from citizen science projects are better cited than the average for papers in astrophysics. In fact, if you look at the plot on the right, it compares the citation rates for projects. The big peak over there is citizen science projects, all right? And the other curve, the great filled in gray curve is projects that are based on the same data, but don't involve citizen scientists. Yeah. So who are NASA citizen scientists besides you guys listening to me go on and on. I'll show you some pictures of folks. Maybe I should be showing you pictures of yourselves, but you haven't said that to me yet. So here are some pictures that I collected. NASA citizen scientists, first of all, they're numerous. We reach probably about a million and a half of them. Sometimes it's hard to keep track. About 6% of them we think, based on at least one real survey, have advanced degrees. So we're talking about at least 60,000 people with advanced degrees, which is comparable to about one sixth of the total US science engineering workforce out there in the form of citizen scientists already engaged in NASA projects. And you'll see from the jobs of the folks on my slide here that, you know, I first went into this thinking maybe I'd meet a lot of folks who would be very casual about their citizen science, or maybe they'd be children. And that's great. And people don't have to go and get as deeply involved in this as they do. But the reality is that we are lucky enough to have people with all kinds of skills and passion for NASA science that I now get to work with through these, through our portfolio projects. That's amazing. So I'm going to jump in here real quick with a question that seems to fit right here. So Sam asks, do the citizen sciences, you know, are there some that are connected with school campuses such as Caltech, USC, UCLA, other, you know, we obviously have an LA basin bias here, but other places around the country is there a concerted effort to work with students at campuses or faculty at campuses? So we haven't specifically been reaching out to college campuses. So NASA's not, you know, hasn't been focusing on education since really about 2013. We are interested in, we're interested in anybody who would like to work with us. So students and faculty are invited to participate and welcome. But that hasn't been a particular focus, maybe it should be. Does that answer the question? Seems to. Okay. Super. So a little bit about how NASA got into citizen science. It started, well, it started sort of awkwardly back in 1958 when the Space Act Agreement, you know, the law that was passed that created NASA said that we shall provide for the widest practical and appropriate dissemination of information concerning NASA's activities and the results thereof. So you know, we could point to that as the origin of a lot of NASA communications and public affairs and so on, but you'll notice the wording in that is not quite perfectly suited for citizen science, it's about dissemination of information. So it's kind of, you know, we'll tell you what we did, right? But you know, take a look at the internet these days, people are no longer content to be just told things and have information blasted out to them, they quite reasonably want to be part of what's going on. And NASA started getting, inviting people to participate in programs in the 70s and 80s with people invited to propose payloads for the shuttle, to contribute seeds to the long-duration satellite experiments in the 80s. Those were relatively small scale, but I think they were sort of the germs, if you don't mind, of NASA's citizen science. And then of course when the internet arrived, things got real. A couple of folks at NASA Ames did this experiment called Click Workers, where they posted some images online of, they had some from Mars and some from the moon, and they asked people to count the craters in the image. And the reason for that is that you can tell the age of a geological surface by how many craters it has, because we know more or less the rate at which a surface in the solar system like the moon surface gets pummeled with meteorites, right? And so, or with impactors, I'll just say. So we know the cratering rate, and so we know, if we can count up how many craters, we know how long the surface has been exposed to impacts, right? And if it's been only exposed for a short time, like say at the surface of the Earth, there aren't that many craters visible on the surface of the Earth, then we know that there are other processes going on that could resurface the body. So that's what the Click Workers folks wanted to find out, was how recently has the moon been resurfaced? And it's a question that professional planetary scientists have been asking themselves for quite some time, and there were many crater counting activities and papers written about crater counting. But Click Workers where the first project was the first time where the public was asked to try their hand at counting craters. And guess what? They did fine. The results from the public's counting of craters were just as lousy as the professional scientist's ability of counting craters. I should note, so they were good. They were just as good as the professional scientists. Turns out that professional scientists have disagreed quite a bit as to the counting of craters, but the public certainly didn't do any worse. And crucially, this showed that it was possible to involve members of the public in a massive scientific collaboration online, and that's really cool, because this started to take off. So starting in about 2006, Andy Westfall and Co-Ice from the Johnson Space Center launched a project called Stardust at Home. And Stardust at Home, they showed, instead of pictures of the lunar service, they showed micrographs of gel that was collecting dust particles from the Stardust mission. And they asked people to examine these micrographs and not just, the resolution is high enough that there were so many images of these micrographs that would take just to cover one macroscopic piece of this gel that they really needed a lot of help. And 30,000 people have since signed up to look for these micrographs. And it resulted in the discovery of the first significant collection of interstellar grains. They found six interstellar grains, which is about five more interstellar grains than anyone had ever found before. So we're talking about these little tiny grains of dust that have arrived to us from beyond the solar system. You can, it might sound, if you're not in the dust business, it might not sound great, it might not sound that exciting. But think about it, this is a little piece of something that you can measure, that you can put under a microscope that you can do chemical testing of to learn about the composition of objects outside the solar system. So that's really exciting and resulted in Citizen Scientists published in Nature. And then Stardust at Home inspired Zooniverse, which has since collected about 2 million Citizen Scientists on its mailing list, participating in about 100 different projects over the last few years and away we go. So today, there are about 18 active NASA funded Citizen Science projects. They're all here collected at science.nasa.gov slash citizen science. And we very much view Citizen Science as the present and future of NASA science. So more and more science, more and more NASA is faced with a big data problem, right? So our telemetry and our detectors are getting to be so powerful that the data rates are getting too high for us to handle without help. Typically, we'll send up a satellite like the one shown on the left. It'll bring home a billion images or spectra or time series or whatever it is. We'll feed that into a computer, get our best scientific teams and programmers that work on it. They'll write some fantastic code, which will do a great job. It will correctly interpret 99% of them, leaving 10 million that we don't have a clue about. Right? And so even after the computer has done its job, we need help from lots of humans figuring out what's going on. And of course, the things that the computer can't interpret correctly are the ones that are the most interesting because we didn't know how to plan for that. All right, let me move on. I will stop the bragging for a little bit. Actually, no, I won't. I can't stop it. And talk to you about some astronomy projects that are active right now that need your help. And they're all at science.nasa.gov slash citizen science. And if you want to stop listening to me and just go there and start doing them, then that's awesome too. So I'll start sort of from the ground and then move outward as I go. So you heard me brag about the new kind of Aurora that appears on that coin. So to help us observe Aurora, go to aurorosaurus.org. And when you sign up, there are two different ways of participating. One is that you can look at people's tweets about auroras and help us figure out whether they are really about auroras or whether they are about an aurora-colored t-shirt. Because often Twitter contains interesting information about auroras, but we need people to help decide what's sort out the good and the bad tweets, the useful ones, the not. And the other mode of participating is to go out and observe the auroras. So aurorasaurus will send you an alert for your location and ask you for help when they need it when they think an aurora is nearby. And especially if you happen to live near the poles and like to take pictures of the sky, you can make a big difference in improving models of the Earth's magnetosphere and the solar wind. So here's the new kind of aurora that citizen scientists at aurorasaurus discovered. They called it Steve, and then later on, the MHD modelers went in and made up a background that goes with Steve. But the amazing thing is that there was anything new to find all on the aurora because people have been observing this for thousands of years. So here's a picture of Steve as this fine purple line in the nice sky. And let me just read this quote to you about how special this is. Finding something you can identify as a new structure in the aurora is unusual. The last major thing was poleward boundary intensification, whatever that is. I'm not a heliophysicist. And you can find that name used back over 20 years ago. So it is really rare to find a new phenomenon in the aurora, but citizen scientists did it. And now, of course, everything lives a second life on Twitter, and Steve has its own Twitter feed. Moving outward from the Earth's atmosphere, the Sun Grazer Project is one of my favorite citizen science stories because it emerged sort of organically. Folks started going to the Soho and Stereo archives and discovering stuff on their own. And then going and pestering Carl Badams, one of the Stereo scientists at NRL and asking, hey, is this a comet? Did I discover a comet? What's this new thing moving in this image? Did I discover a new comet? And he got annoyed at being pestered. And he set up a simple HTML web page saying, if you think you found a comet, here's what you need to check. Check this, check this, write this up, check this, and then go away and stop bothering me. And 15 or so years later, this is turned into the Sun Grazer Project, which has now discovered 3,729 comets. That's more than half of the known comets. You can see in the lower left of my picture, there's one zipping right into the Sun. And some of them are indeed crashing into the Sun. Some of them swing around the other side. This is pretty much the process for how people do it. It's not, this is not for kids, right? You'll have to go down and download the latest images from the NASA archive. People are providing their own image processing software to look for moving objects. And then they're using a report form to report their candidates in terms of the pixel coordinates. This cool animation shows, you can see, 14 years of discoveries from Project Sun Grazer. These are all those comets zipping through the inner solar system. One exciting thing you'll notice is that the comets come in groups. So Project Sun Grazer discovered not just individual comets, but the phenomenon of these grouped comets. These new families of comets, like the Coates family that zipping by in red there. And what we think those represent are objects that all stem from a single collision or from a single parent body. So maybe there was one large comet that was ripped apart by tides, strong tides, or a collision or something like that and shredded into a lot of little pieces. So if you hate comets and you're all about asteroids, you might prefer the International Astronomical Search Collaboration, which sends folks images from the Las Cumbres Observatory and asks them to search again for moving dots, which could be asteroids. ISE has discovered 47 new asteroids so far. The way to join is to get together a group of people and email these folks, email addresses below, and ask to join a campaign. And they will send you a stack of data to look through and give you some tips on how to do it. And then, if you discover that, you'll be filling out reports and submitting the asteroids to the Minor Planet Center. The future astronomer from the Moscow Pioneer Palace continues to study the found name of the asteroid. That's how he flew away, he flew off to Mars orbit. And his orbit looks like this in the solar system. They are looking for a celestial body with a picture that is made by an American telescope installed on Hawaii. The scientists from the United States have time to look through all the footage and attract the good-natured astronomers from different countries. The students from Moscow take part in the International Astronomical Search Company for the second time. When did I send it? You probably guessed that that's a group of students in Russia who just discovered three near-earth asteroids using IASC. Does anybody speak Russian, by the way? Because I have no idea what they were saying. I only caught the word American ski. We have somebody with Russian friends but no speakers. No one's a Russian to tell me the answer. Okay, moving a little bit further from the surface of the earth, I come to a project called Dissetective, which is my personal entry into citizen science. The citizen science project with about 30,000 volunteers. I launched in 2014 using the Zooniverse platform. Dissetective, well, I'll say we search for disks around nearby stars. We think that planets formed out of disks of gas and dust, which coalesce together. Some stars retain these disks for billions of years and we can see them. We can image them with large telescopes, with Hubble, and so on. And you can't really see a planet forming itself because it forms in the middle of one of these disks. So taking pictures of these disks, figuring out their demographics and so on, is how we know most of what we know about how planets form, like say our own planet. So disks are provided a wealth of information about planet formation over the years. And an important step in this process is searching for disks that are in these things called young moving groups. So stars don't just sort of form at random times at random places, they form in groups. And we can see the remnants of these groups. Sometimes we'll see star forming regions, like you know Orion or Taurus or so on. But also you can see groups of stars that are older than that, that still retain their association, not because they're all clumped together on the sky in the middle of a ball of gas and dust and so on. But you can see that they're associated dynamically. You can see that their velocities are all clustered together in velocity space. And the thing is that these groups of stars can be all over the sky. So they're not clustered together in direction anymore. They can be spread all over. So they're hard to find. So you really have to search through a lot of objects. And that's exactly what we've been doing at this detective. So the NASA's WISE mission detected about two billion sources. And we found through this detective about 50,000 disks spread all around the sky in this collection of sources. This detective is currently on hiatus, but it's going to be relaunching soon in another month or two at this detective.org with a new batch of data. So finding these disks in young moving groups is crucial because if you find a group of stars or a new object in a group of stars that all formed at the same time, then you can use models of how stars evolved to figure out the age of the whole group. And that tells you the age of your star. Wouldn't it be great if stars came stamped with their ages on them, but they don't? This is one of the best methods we have for putting timestamps on things we observe. So this provides our timeline for planet formation that we hang everything on. Well, this detective made a pretty cool discovery. It discovered the end of that timeline. So it discovered the oldest protoplanetary disks. People assumed previously that protoplanetary disks that is one to contain gas enough to form a planet like Jupiter disappeared after five, certainly by 10 million years. This detective discovered a has now discovered four of these that are in the 40 to 50 million year range. So they're between five and 10 times as old as people thought to live. Hence the name Peter Pan disks, they won't grow up. This detective discovered that and I discovered some amazing citizen scientists like Hugo Durantini-Luca, who not only did he become a star classifier on the website, he drove into the University of Cordova in Argentina and introduced us to some professional colleagues who could help us get more telescope time to observe southern hemisphere objects. And then he drove to Argentina to help us out with an observing run. The next project that I launched myself is called Backyard Worlds, Backyard Worlds Planet 9. And this project also uses data from NASA's Wwise Mission, which by the way is still continuing to take data. So we're still getting more data for both of these projects, even though we haven't finished combing through all the data that we have already. So about 150,000 citizen scientists have helped with Backyard Worlds, they've done about 6 million classifications and we've asked them to look at this time at the data for moving objects. For example, you'll see here in this picture a that the Earth is staring at a little red dot that is moving and looks distinctively different from all of the other kind of, it's kind of three petaled flowers that you'll see in the background, which are stars, maybe they're variable stars, maybe they are just poorly subtracted stars. Anyway, the moving object stands out and that's because that is a kind of quitter called a brown dwarf, which I'm sure you've heard of. It's a, I think of brown dwarfs, you know, they're objects that are lower in mass than stars, but they aren't usually called planets. The thing is that at the low mass end of the brown dwarfs overlaps with that of planets. So you could think of a low mass brown dwarf as kind of a rogue planet, a planet without a star. And that's what you're looking at is here is a planet without a star. It's about room temperature. It's about the size of Jupiter. And this is called 0855. It's the coldest known brown dwarf. And you can see it clearly in this image at Backyard Worlds.org. So, Mark, we've got a question from Susan. And so in projects like this where there's some data, do you provide what kind of parameters do you provide for what's required for processing the data? Great. So, Backyard Worlds.org and Disdetective both show you data that's been pre-processed. So they're set up to make it as simple as possible for you to get started. You go there and take a short tutorial and you'll be looking at data right away from a satellite. There's also a field guide to help you practice. These should be pretty straightforward to get into. The fund begins, of course, with this kind of project. A lot of our fund work has been done behind the scenes where people will discover something and then they'll reach out to the science team and we provide ways to do that on the site. And then we get to know people more one-on-one and people do side projects and they devise their own ways of interrogating the data and that's worked out amazingly. But just to get started in this kind of project, Backyard Worlds and Disdetective, those ones should be a breeze. If you can't get it to work, jot me a line and I'll try to help. Something like, back up a little bit. So, let's see. So, ISC and they pronounce Isaac over there and Project Sun Grazer require a little bit more research on your own to get the software going and so on. But they can help you through that. They can help you get started if you reach out to them. But really dig into those websites and try to do it yourself and then email them if you get stuck. I'd say those are sort of more advanced projects. We've got a question about this image from David. The brown dwarf is obviously illuminated or maybe it's luminous. What is illuminating it in the red-brown wavelength or is this a false color? Thanks. It is 100% a false color. We are looking at a composite of two infrared bands. But it is shining under its own light. It's not reflecting starlight or anything at us. It's shining brown dwarfs. They begin their lives with some nuclear fusion like a star. Then that goes away soon, promptly. And then they continue shining under the heat from their own formation. Their gravitational collapse heats up the gas. It takes a long time for that energy to leak out. It takes billions of years for all the energy to escape from the brown dwarf. So they keep shining. It's not really all that bright. It's really dim. You know, it's room temperature, right? I mean, look around you in your room where stuff looks like it's shining. It doesn't look by way to me. It's dim, but we have got a space telescope out there that's good at seeing this stuff. So there we go. Yay. NASA is still useful for some things in astronomy. It's good to go to space sometimes where it's really cold and we can use our infrared detectors. So the backyard worlds, we are right. Here's a map of the backyard. Our solar neighborhood. There's a sun in the center. And you'll see on there on the upper left corner there's the ISO 855, which is a brown dwarf we were just looking at and talking about. And there are some other nearby objects. These are the four closest known systems to the sun. There's Alpha-San, Proxima-San, right? We really know next to nothing about what's between us and Proxima-San. And we're hoping that backyard worlds might help us fill in that space to see if there is anything else closer to the sun. Another possibility is that there'll be a new planet that we'll find in the outer solar system. You've probably heard about this object. You are calling Planet 9, which we have no one has seen yet. But we're inferring its presence from pattern that we see in the orbits of the scattered Kuiper Belt objects. Sorry, the outskirts of the solar system. It has this big cloud of stuff called a Kuiper Belt. The most famous example of a Kuiper Belt object, of course, is Pluto. But the outer Kuiper Belt objects have this really interesting pattern. First of all, the ones that we see have eccentric orbits. Second of all, most of them are all hanging on one side of the sun. As you can see in this picture, just a picture of their orbits, they're all kind of clustered with their parent centers of their orbit, their perihelion, all on one side of the sun. They're coupled in the opposite direction, but most of them are on one side. And there's another pattern which you can't see in this picture, which is that the longitudes of the ascending nodes are also lined up. Anyway, a very neat, a very tidy explanation for the patterns that we're seeing is that there is another planet out there that's shepherding them, orbiting in a few hundred AU. It's something that's maybe six to ten earth masses. You know, it interacts, it pushes on these things gravitationally and shepherds them into these special orbits. So we would sure like to find this thing and we are sensitive to it in the, with the Backyard World's Planet 9 search. We are the only all-sky, the only ongoing all-sky infrared search for Planet 9. So if Planet 9 turns out to be highly reflective, then it will be easier to see it with something like Subaru, like what Mike Brown is trying to do. But if it turns out to be very absorptive and hence brighter in the infrared, then we have a good shot at seeing it. And it will look a lot like a brown dwarf. So we're thinking about the orbital properties of a lot of the objects that are being imaged. So we've got a question from Sam is wondering about if any of the Kuiper Belt objects will potentially collide with any of the other inner and or outer planets such as, you know, is positing perhaps Pluto with Neptune in the far distant future. Right. So I know that's a tough speculative one, isn't it? We don't maybe have enough data or enough years worth of calculations out in the future to determine that perhaps. So a big limitation, I would say, and answering that question is our lack of knowledge of the orbits of the Kuiper Belt objects. So for most, you know, these objects are faint. They've generally been only observed a few times and the resolution of the observations is limited. The time baseline is limited. So the uncertainties in the orbits are higher than you might like to be able to predict the future, you know, the really far distant future of them. To make good predictions of whether or not things are going to collide and really model the chaotic dynamics of the outer solar system for billions of years in the future like that, whether any two given objects are likely to collide is tough for a bunch of other reasons as well. Like you need to know the masses of the objects, like how accurately do you know the mass of Neptune. So I'm going to give that one a big old I don't know. And then I'm going to tell you more about awesome stuff we found back in our world's plan nine. Actually, I haven't told you about any of our discoveries yet. So here's our first one. Remember how I said that most that our best discoveries have been serendipitous? Well, back in our world is no exception. So we went in searching for brown dwarfs and what we find we found our record breaking white dwarf. So citizen scientist Marina Thevenot was recovering from surgery, had some time on our hands and started working on the project and said, hey, you know what, you could use the same process to search for white dwarfs. I went through a whole list of candidates and found a white dwarf with a disk. Now white dwarf, they're about maybe 100 or so known white dwarfs with discs. So that was cool, but not the whole story. We knew it had a disk because it was too bright in in infrared or to be just a brown dwarf. There's excess radiation coming from circumstellar dust and the extra radiation moved with the white dwarfs. You know, associate with the white dwarf. But here's the thing. This white dwarf is the oldest example that we have a white dwarf with a disk. So the future of the solar system is not looking so great. The sun will swell up into a giant. I'm sure you've heard the story. It will, it may or may not engulf the earth. It's hard to say, but it'll come close. And then it will blow off its outer layer and shrink down to a white dwarf. And what's left of the solar system will be some asteroids and outer planets. All that stuff will have been shaken up by the mass loss process. And some of the comets and asteroids will likely rain down upon the white dwarf and become shredded by the strong tides in the vicinity of the white dwarf into a disk. And so the future of our solar system is going to turn into a white dwarf with a disk. And Molina found using the backyard world's plant line, the oldest example of this phenomenon. So we call it the crystal ball white dwarf. It's the peak into the distant future of the solar system. And then here's a sneak preview of a paper which we're about to submit a new discovery call that we're calling the missing link brown dwarf. So the diagram on the right shows you the special types of round dwarfs with 0855. That's the one that we've been talking about. The coldest known what brown dwarf is that yellow dot in the upper right hand corner. Citizen scientists found the second coldest example, which is 0830. And you'll see there's a big gap between 0855 and the rest of the crowd. So for a while we've had no examples of anything filling in that gap just seem like 0855 was kind of off by itself, but this fills in that space. So we can study it with James Webb Space Telescope hopefully next year or two and try to figure out what happens in that space how brown dwarfs evolve as they cool through that temperature zone. And by the way, the image that you're seeing of left the artists depiction of this is made by another citizen scientist who has to be a cracker jack muralist and we put together this image for it that we're going to use in the press release. NASA's test hold on before I show you the video moving on to another citizen science project. One about extra solar plans I'll show you the video. NASA's test mission just discovered its first circum binary planet, a world orbiting two stars instead of one named to I 1338 be it's nearly the size of Saturn and orbits its stars every 95 days. The two stars orbit each other and consist of a small cool and work and one much like the sun. Together they form what is called an eclipsing binary, which means the stars regularly pass in front of each other from our point of view. Tess hunts for planets in these and other systems by looking for tiny regular dips in starlight called transits test saw to I 1338 bees transits of the large star, but spotting them in the data wasn't easy. A high school intern examined hundreds of eclipsing binaries to search for planetary transits, which can look similar to some of the eclipses. Ultimately, he uncovered transits caused by the planet. If you could orbit to I 1338 be you'd have a front row seat to see its sons eclipse each other every 15 days. But the angle of the planets orbit around the stars changes over time. After 2023, we won't see it pass in front of the stars for another eight years. Tess will observe hundreds of thousands of eclipsing binaries. So there may be other planets similar to to I 1338 be waiting to be discovered. So you've probably heard about the planet hunters citizen science project and also, of course, NASA's Kepler and test missions, which have been searching for extra solar planets using the transit method. So we search for planets that cross between us and the star and temporarily cause the star to dim as they block a little bit of the stars. So citizen scientists at planet hunters first started combing through data from the Kepler mission and discovered most of the known long period planets. Now they are using a new incarnation of the project called planet hunters tests, and they are searching for planets in data from the test mission. So the test mission is also looking for transiting planets. Unlike Kepler, which was looking at a relatively small field, a small part of the sky, Tess scans the entire sky, almost the entire sky, search for planets. So Tess is going to find objects that are the transiting planets that are generally closer to the sun, ones that we could have more potential on average for follow up observing with things like the James Webb Space Telescope. Dr. Cruz, do you have a question? Yes, we have another question there, and then I also wanted to do a time check. We're now approximately five minutes out or thereabouts. Okay, I will zoom ahead because I would like to get everybody's, I would like to pose some questions for everybody. Okay, so Susan asks, is Planet Hunter something that is easily accessible or does it require more data science skills? Planet Hunter's test is another one of these projects that aims to be super simple to get started. Just go there and start looking at data right away. The problem is it's so popular that it is perpetually out of data. So you have to catch it kind of at a good time when they've just gotten the latest data done. But you can head right now to planethunter.org and see if they've got a fresh batch. And then here's the question on everyone's mind. I'm sure Steph asked this, do citizen scientists get to name what they discover? So, you may have heard from the name of this planet that it has a, you know, a number name, and most of the plants end up in a catalog with a number. Astronomers are really bad with names. So on the other hand, objects that are unusual that don't yet have a catalog to put them in. Astronomers do get to name, you would do get to name. So for example, comets and asteroids, the discoverer proposes a name to the International Astronomical Union, and it's generally accepted unless it's, you know, vulgar. So, if you want to name something, go for one of the asteroid or comet projects, and you have a good shot. And if you discover more than one, please name one after my kids. So, I'm going to go fast, and then I'm going to ask you guys some questions, and chat a little bit. So, so PlanetHunter's test is something that's simple to get involved in. If you want to do some observing of exoplanets with your own telescopes, I also recommend that you check out astrodenis.org, which has, sorry, dot com, which has these great tips for how to get involved using your own telescope to contribute to following up planets discovered with the test mission. So the test mission is soliciting help from amateurs and groups of amateurs in following up planets that have already been discovered to keep the ephemeris current to make sure that we know when the transit, the timing of the transit from now into the future so we can better follow it up with other telescopes. And astrodenis.com I think has the best, is the best source of tips on how to get involved doing that. Okay, now I have questions for you guys. So, the big question on my mind is, what can we get NASA to do to help turn more of you guys into our professional colleagues, into our scientific colleagues? What should we be doing? Give me some advice. And that's certainly a question that we're not going to be able to answer, you know, in this form. But, you know, it's certainly something that we're really interested in, with the Night Sky Network in supporting that. And so that we can have more of these sorts of projects that all of our member clubs, the members of our member clubs can engage in. So, so it looks like we've got a few comments and Dave, if you wouldn't mind helping take a look at some of these, I would appreciate it too. Yes, I can't see the comments and I'm afraid right now. That's okay. That's okay. He's definitely getting invites to come to the Astronomical League Conference in New Mexico. Oh, okay, fantastic. Yes, please do keep track of these for me. Yeah, I don't want to lose that kind of thing. Great, so go to... Okay, and someone wants to speak at NIEF too. NIEF, fantastic. Northeast Astronomy Forum. That's in April. Thank you guys. And this was probably something, you know, as the Night Sky Network continually wants to find better ways to serve our membership. You know, this is something that we're really interested in, and so we'll find a way. I think that we were to, Vivian had to leave us, but I think that she would be really interested in discovering some of this too. And so I think that you can look forward to us helping to answer some of these questions. So thank you, Brian. So one thought that crossed our minds, and it sounds like maybe it's crossing your minds as well, is that maybe we should have some kind of events or maybe go to ongoing events, go to existing events and try to just bring face-to-face more NASA scientists and amateur astronomers. Should we be holding? What do you think? Sounds like we should... I think I already got an answer to that. Yes, we should start showing up at more events and maybe try to hold some of our own events. Does that sound right? Well, it looks like there's some pretty enthusiastic people here, and we see they'd like more webinars like this to get the word out, maybe some columns and some of the magazines. A lot of times programs like this people don't know about, and so how do they hear about it? And a lot of times they don't even know where to hear about it. So casting a wide net is certainly a good thing. Got it, got it. So we are lapsing over seven. I don't know how much more you have there, Mark, but I had a question that I wanted to pose to everyone. Mark had a whole lot of different projects that he described, and there's probably others as well. We kind of like to just get a really quick sense from all of you. Had I known that I wanted to ask this question or would have set up a poll beforehand, it ended up being a little bit cumbersome to do it on the fly. Just really quickly in the chat indicate whether or not you've been involved in a citizen science project and which one. Just really quick. I think that Mark would be really interested to know how many of you have actually actively participated. Yes, thank you, Brian. I would love to know that. AsteroQuest IASC Globe at Night with light pollution. That's another one. Asteroid mapping. Let's see. Somebody's another Globe at Night, Zooniverse, an Asteroid one. Then SETI at home. Does that count? AFSO, Variable Stars. That's certainly something that then light pollution, cataclysmic variable star observing. More Zooniverse, the 2017 Eclipse, more Globe at Night, more AFSO. It looks like a lot of the people on the webinar have been very much involved. We had a Citizen Kate astronomer. That's great. We've got a lot of inherent interest in the group that we have here. I think that we have a very small number of the total number of people that we have in the Night Sky Network. Just based on that, I would guess that maybe a quarter of the people that are on, maybe even half the people that are on here have been involved in some sort of citizen science effort. That really bodes well for the future of the effort. Outstanding. I do see one question here, which I can answer. Okay. This is a social media platform, which is, we've got now, Scienceing with NASA, the Facebook group. I think I've got this right. Scienceing? It's Scienceing with NASA. If you go search for Scienceing with NASA. Oh, good. Oh, somebody got it. I've got it. Thank you, Laurie. Yes. I'm not checking to make sure what anywhere, but maybe. Oh, Laurie just joined. Yay. Fantastic. So yes, so we have the Scienceing with NASA Facebook group. It's an experiment. Unfortunately, we're getting dogged by a lot of bots and stuff like that, which is making it tough. We do not yet have a Citizen Science Slack channel. Would anyone like to start one? If we started one, would you guys join? Yes. Yes. Yes. Bill, there are so many different opportunities to interact online these days that are, you know, it's hard to keep track of them all. Slack Discord is a big one too, for a lot of folks. Okay. Wonderful. Yeah, I like that. I mean, one challenge that we have being government agency is that whatever we create has to be open to anybody. And that sometimes invites. Some non-productive members, if you know what I mean. Yeah. But if you guys start one, that's not in this, that's no longer true. Well, that's, that's something that we, you know, we should talk about online about that. I think that there are so many, you know, such a realm of possibilities for people to get involved. And that's something that I know that we here are interested very much in trying to facilitate that for the folks that we work with. And so we're going to be working on it everyone. We're going to be working together. Outstanding. Outstanding. Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Mark, for joining us. I hope we managed to, I didn't lose too much there at the end. If you're willing to share your contact information and wouldn't mind putting that into the chat, that would be wonderful. If you're not, I understand that, you know, people get all kinds of interesting things when they have their email out there. Although they could look it up online. That's public records. Yes. There we go. All right. Well, thank you so much, Mark, for joining us. And thank you everyone for tuning in.