The Verge Science Makes a Video of the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 Project

Exciting news everyone! The citizen science project called Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 which I co-founded with Marc Kuchner (NASA), Aaron Meisner (NSF-NOIR labs) and Adam Schneider (USNO) was just featured in a lengthy video by the popular science media outlet “The Verge”. You can watch this 9:22 length feature in the youtube link below and read about it here. We co-founded Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 (but really we just call it Backyard Worlds) back in 2017 with a hope that we would start to locate some missing cold compact worlds near the Sun. When we started I had no idea how many people we would reach or how good they would be at finding objects. The premise of the project is that crow sourcing image searches would yield better results than what scientists like me are able to produce with all the tools and know-how at our disposal. Now that we are four years into the project I can say wholeheartedly that citizen scientists are AMAZING at this. Our portal is one way to get going but really it has been the citizen scientists that have taken to writing our science team on a regular basis that has really moved the needle on mapping the neighborhood around the Sun. Through dedicated searches both in the portal and beyond, our volunteers have located thousands of worlds that were previously missed by even the most informed searches of our sky. We have had more than 30 citizen scientists become co-authors on peer reviewed Astrophysical journal papers due to their important contributions. If you are thinking “wait how can I become a part of this??” well just check out our website: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/marckuchner/backyard-worlds-planet-9 and if it intrigues you, send me a message and you will get an invite to our email list. Once a week we hold a 1.5 hour long research discussion with the science team. We regularly get 15-20 citizen scientists to join in on the discussion.