Citizen Scientists Discover Yellow "Space Balls"
 
April 9, 2015:  Citizen scientists scanning images from NASA's Spitzer Space
Telescope, an orbiting infra-red observatory, recently stumbled upon a new
class of curiosities that had gone largely unrecognized before: yellow balls.
 
"The volunteers started chatting about the yellow balls they kept seeing in
the images of our galaxy, and this brought the features to our attention,"
said Grace Wolf-Chase of the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blr-qDffIq0&feature=youtu.be
 
A new ScienceCast video examines "yellow balls" and their role in star
formation. Play it
 
The Milky Way Project is one of many "citizen scientist" projects making up
the Zooniverse website, which relies on crowdsourcing to help process
scientific data.  For years, volunteers have been scanning Spitzer's images of
star-forming regions-places where clouds of gas and dust are collapsing to
form clusters of young stars.  Professional astronomers don't fully understand
the process of star formation; much of the underlying physics remains a
mystery. Citizen scientists have been helping by looking for clues.
 
Before the yellow balls popped up, volunteers had already noticed green
bubbles with red centers, populating a landscape of swirling gas and dust.
These bubbles are the result of massive newborn stars blowing out cavities in
their surroundings. When the volunteers started reporting that they were
finding objects in the shape of yellow balls, the Spitzer researchers took
note.
 
The rounded features captured by the telescope, of course, are not actually
yellow, red, or green-they just appear that way in the infrared,
color-assigned images that the telescope sends to Earth. The false colors
provide a way to humans to talk about infrared wavelengths of light their eyes
cannot actually see.
 
"With prompting by the volunteers, we analyzed the yellow balls and figured
out that they are a new way to detect the early stages of massive star
formation," said Charles Kerton of Iowa State University, Ames. "The simple
question of 'Hmm, what's that?' led us to this discovery."
 
A thorough analysis by the team led to the conclusion that the yellow balls
precede the green bubbles, representing a phase of star formation that takes
place before the bubbles form.
 
"Basically, if you wind the clock backwards from the bubbles, you get the
yellow balls," said Kerton.
 
[Bad Link]
 
An artist's concept shows how "yellow balls" fit into the process of star
formation.
 
Researchers think the green bubble rims are made largely of organic molecules
called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). PAHs are abundant in the dense
molecular clouds where stars coalesce. Blasts of radiation and winds from
newborn stars push these PAHs into a spherical shells that look like green
bubbles in Spitzer's images. The red cores of the green bubbles are made of
warm dust that has not yet been pushed away from the windy stars.
 
How do the yellow balls fit in?
 
"The yellow balls are a missing link," says Wolf-Chase. They represent a
transition "between very young embryonic stars buried in dense, dusty clouds
and slightly older, newborn stars blowing the bubbles."
 
Essentially, the yellow balls mark places where the PAHs (green) and the dust
(red) have not yet separated. The superposition of green and red makes yellow.
 
So far, the volunteers have identified more than 900 of these compact, yellow
features.  The multitude gives researchers plenty of chances to test their
hypotheses and learn more about the way stars form.
 
Meanwhile, citizen scientists continue to scan Spitzer's images for new finds.
Green bubbles.  Red cores.  Yellow balls.  What's next?  You could be the one
who makes the next big discovery.  To get involved, go to zooniverse.org and
click on "The Milky Way Project."
 
Credits:
Author: Rachel Molina | Production editor: Dr. Tony Phillips | Credit:
Science@NASA
 
 
Regards,
 
Roger

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 * Origin: NCS BBS - Houma, LoUiSiAna (1:3828/7)