Disk Detective: Discovery of New Circumstellar Disk Candidates through Citizen Science
Abstract
The Disk Detective citizen science project aims to find new stars with 22 micron excess emission from circumstellar dust using data from NASA's WISE mission. Initial cuts on the AllWISE catalog provide an input catalog of 277,686 sources. Volunteers then view images of each source online in 10 different bands to identify false-positives (galaxies, background stars, interstellar matter, image artifacts, etc.). Sources that survive this online vetting are followed up with spectroscopy on the FLWO Tillinghast telescope. This approach should allow us to unleash the full potential of WISE for finding new debris disks and protoplanetary disks. We announce a first list of 37 new disk candidates discovered by the project, and we describe our vetting and follow-up process. One of these systems appears to contain the first debris disk discovered around a star with a white dwarf companion: HD 74389. We also report four newly discovered classical Be stars (HD 6612, HD 7406, HD 164137, and HD 218546) and a new detection of 22 micron excess around a previously known debris disk host star, HD 22128.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1607.05713,
title = {Disk Detective: Discovery of New Circumstellar Disk Candidates through Citizen Science},
author = {Marc J. Kuchner and Steven M. Silverberg and Alissa S. Bans and Shambo Bhattacharjee and Scott J. Kenyon and John H. Debes and Thayne Currie and Luciano Garcia and Dawoon Jung and Chris Lintott and Michael McElwain and Deborah L. Padgett and Luisa M. Rebull and John P. Wisniewski and Erika Nesvold and Kevin Schawinski and Michelle L. Thaller and Carol A. Grady and Joseph Biggs and Milton Bosch and Tadeás Cernohous and Hugo A. Durantini Luca and Michiharu Hyogo and Lily Lau Wan Wah and Art Piipuu and Fernanda Piñeiro},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1607.05713},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
50 pages, accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal