Oh, I love stories like this: “Citizen scientists” —people who are not necessarily trained scientists but are enthusiastic and eager to take part in scientific research— have discovered a brown dwarf near the Sun. They examined data taken by an orbiting observatory and found the little beastie right at the edge of the telescope’s detection capabilities.

OK, first: Simply put, a brown dwarf is an object that is in between the mass of a planet and a star. That’s really too simply put; we’re talking about a rich and diverse class of objects, every bit as varied and interesting as planets and stars themselves (for that reason, I think it’s unfair to call them “failed stars,” as some do; they are their own thing, and fascinating in their own right). You can find out a lot about them by watching my brown dwarf episode of Crash Course Astronomy:

That’s why the folks at Zooniverse decided to take this on. This is a group of astronomers and researchers who figured out that non-scientists can not only participate in scientific research but also give a meaningful contribution to it as well. They collect data in the public domain (quite a bit of astronomical data) and present them in such a way that people can analyze them through simple tasks. For example, Galaxy Zoo asks people to identify spiral galaxies and determine whether the arms open clockwise or counterclockwise. Simple, fun, and oddly addictive, in fact. I’ve identified hundreds of galaxies myself there, and they’ve published quite a few papers on the results.

They did a similar project with the WISE images. Called Back Yard Worlds, it blinks four images from WISE observations taken of the same part of the sky at different times. The images have been processed a bit, subtracting one from another, so that fixed objects like stars and galaxies are suppressed, hopefully leaving behind moving targets. Your task: Look for the things that change. It’s not easy; I just tried it and there are lots of things that can fool the eye. But if enough people look at enough images, things turn up.