You can help NASA map where new planets are born

Space · Published 25 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Planets form from swirling clouds of gas and dust around baby stars, a process spanning millions of years. Because this evolution is so slow, scientists need to study thousands of examples at once. Now, they are turning to the public to help identify these cosmic nurseries.

The Disk Detective project is a citizen science initiative designed to help astrophysicists understand the timeline of planet formation. By identifying stars surrounded by cloud disks, researchers can trace how these structures evolve over time. This data is critical because it provides the primary evidence for determining exactly how long it takes for planets to form from their initial dust and gas particles.

The project recently relaunched with a dataset of approximately 150,000 stars, specifically targeting M dwarfs—the most common type of star in our galaxy. It also focuses on brown dwarfs, which are balls of gas that do not burn hydrogen like true stars and instead resemble giant planets such as Jupiter. Participants use an interface to view real astronomical images from missions including WISE (now NEOWISE), the ground-based Pan-STARRS in Hawaii, and the 2MASS survey.

The methodology relies on the 'wisdom of the crowd.' Multiple volunteers examine each object independently to provide separate opinions, which scientists then aggregate to distinguish between galaxies and stars with disks. While anyone can participate regardless of prior knowledge, advanced users can access professional data archives. Notably, this collaboration has already resulted in 15 citizen scientists becoming named co-authors on peer-reviewed scientific papers.

Once the public identifies potential candidates, professional scientists follow up using more sophisticated tools and new observations to confirm the findings. This pipeline allows for a massive scale of data processing that would be difficult for a small team of professionals to complete alone.

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