Pinpointing the Sun's Neighbors Within Vast Data Archives
Abstract
Mapping the solar neighborhood is a time-honored quest in the field of astronomy, but surprisingly many of our closest substellar neighbors have gone overlooked. By fully scouring vast archives hosting modern survey datasets, we can uncover more of the faintest and coldest nearby brown dwarfs, thereby gaining critical insights about the substellar mass function and exoplanet atmospheres. Our Backyard Worlds citizen-science project is searching for cold and close substellar objects by combining the power of data archives with a legion of over 100,000 dedicated volunteers. The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Legacy Imaging Surveys provide the main datasets that Backyard Worlds citizen-scientists explore: custom infrared sky maps from NASA's WISE satellite [1] and wide-area red-optical imaging [2], [3] from the Dark Energy Survey (DES), Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey (DECaLS), and Mayall z-band Legacy Survey (MzLS).
- Publication:
-
The NOIRLab Mirror
- Pub Date:
- January 2021
- Bibcode:
- 2021Mirro...2...12M