With the latest technology, scientists have been discovering new things in our universe. Not all discoveries are made by professionals though, as amateur astronomers and hobbyists could also contribute in discovering new objects in space. This has been the case when amateurs and professionals joined up to discover what could possibly be the oldest planet-forming disk found so far.
Lately, there have been a number of planetary disks being discovered. Now a new one is being added to it, with the help of amateur astronomers. They have joined professional ones which include Carnegie's Jonathan Gagne. The team is led by Steven Silverberg of the University of Oklahoma.
To help in this, Disk Detective has been created, according to Science Daily. The aim of this project is to find new circumstellar disks. This project is led by Dr. Marc Kuchner. At Disk Detective's website are images and videos taken from NASA's surveys. The Disk Detective site has been visited by amateur astronomers that have identified a number of those images.
"Without the help of the citizen scientists examining these objects and finding the good ones, we might never have spotted the object," Kuchner said. About 30,000 amateur astronomers have passed through the site, Phys Org reports.
The planetary disk is in the Carina association, which is a group of stars that has been born at the same time and in the same stellar nursery. The planetary disk has a red dwarf as its primary star. Gagne has devised a test to determine if the star does belong to this group, which helped in knowing its age.
"It's surprising to see a circumstellar disk around a star that may be 45 million years old, because we normally expect these disks to dissipate within a few million years," Gagne said. He added that more observations will have to be made to see if the star is really that old. There could also be a possibility that planets might be forming around the star, which would be another surprise given the star is already old.
