Discovering Hidden Factors in Stellar Formation: A Study of Brown Dwarfs and Citizen Science’s Role

A new study published in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series has shown that there are four times as many stars as brown dwarfs within a 65-light-year radius from the Sun. However, low-mass objects are more common than high-mass ones, with the average mass being just 40 percent that of the Sun. J. Davy Kirkpatrick, lead author of the study and a researcher at Caltech’s Infrared Processing and Analysis Center in California, believes that there may be something about the star formation process hidden in the data.

Brown dwarfs are unique objects that lie between stars and planets in terms of mass, not fusing hydrogen in their cores like stars do but more massive than planets like Jupiter. The study suggests that the formation process of brown dwarfs may differ from that of higher mass stars, indicating that different factors may determine which type of object is formed during the collapse of gas and dust clouds.

Involving citizen scientists in the identification process of objects in this census was critical to speeding up the process by 10 to 15 years compared to traditional methods. Through Backyard Worlds, citizen scientists contribute by identifying objects in image sets that could be brown dwarfs, searching for the movement of objects relative to the background. This collaborative effort has proven to be valuable in advancing our understanding of the cosmos.