This is actually amusing. welcome to empirical science. I learned this lesson many years ago when I noted that a disproportionate number of ore bodies were located adjacent to major roadways. It is all about eyeballs. Enough eyeballs actually cancel out the natural innate tendency to see what is expected rather than what is anomalous. Of course that means almost every geologiest in Canada got to drive over these ore bodies.
Thus someone finally noting those yellow blogs as been blogs finally got traction and we now know we are looking at initial star formation.
This is excellent news and will lead to more discoveries as well.
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Spot the ball! Amateur astronomers report mysterious 'yellow balls'
in space telescope images - and Nasa reveals they are a groundbreaking
'missing link' in star formation
- Volunteers scan tens of thousands of images using the Web-based Milky Way Project
- Users started chatting about the yellow balls they kept seeing in the images of galaxy
- Astronomers investigated - and found they are a new way to spot stars forming
Volunteers
scanning thousands of images from Nasa's Spitzer space telescope have
made a major breakthrough in our understanding of how planets form.
They reported spotting strange 'yellow balls' in images.
After further analysis, researchers now believe they are the early stages of massive stars forming.
Volunteers using the web-based Milky
Way Project brought star-forming features nicknamed "yellowballs" to the
attention of researchers, who later showed that they are a phase of
massive star formation.
Volunteers
scan tens of thousands of starry images from NASA's Spitzer Space
Telescope using the Web-based Milky Way Project, and began talking about
the strange features.
'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.
A
colorful, 122-foot (37-meter) Spitzer mosaic of the Milky Way hangs at
the planetarium, showcasing our galaxy's bubbling brew of stars.
The
yellow balls in this mosaic appear small but are actually several
hundred to thousands of times the size of our solar system.
'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.'
Kerton is lead author, and Wolf-Chase a co-author, of a new study on the findings in the Astrophysical Journal.
The
Milky Way Project is one of many so-called citizen scientist projects
making up the Zooniverse website, which relies on crowdsourcing to help
process scientific data.
So
far, more than 70 scientific papers have resulted from volunteers using
Zooniverse, four of which are tied to the Milky Way Project.
In
2009, volunteers using a Zooniverse project called Galaxy Zoo began
chatting about unusual objects they dubbed 'green peas.' Their efforts
led to the discovery of a class of compact galaxies that churned out
extreme numbers of stars.
In the
Milky Way Project, volunteers scan through images that Spitzer took of
the thick plane of our galaxy, where newborn stars are igniting in
swaths of dust.
The infrared wavelengths detected by Spitzer have been assigned visible colors we can see with our eyes.
In
addition to the yellow balls, there are many 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.
The
green bubble rims are made largely of organic molecules called
polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), cleared away by blasts of
radiation and winds from the central star.
Dust warmed by the star appears red in the center of the bubbles.
This series of images show three
evolutionary phases of massive star formation, as pictured in infrared
images from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.
Volunteers have classified more than 5,000 of these green bubbles using the project's Web-based tools.
When
they started reporting that they were finding more reoccurring features
in the shape of yellow balls, the Spitzer researchers took note and
even named the features accordingly.
In astronomy and other digital imaging, yellow represents areas where green and red overlap. So what are these yellow balls?
A
thorough analysis by the team led to the conclusion that the yellow
balls precede the green bubble features, representing a phase of star
formation that takes place before the bubbles form.
'The
yellow balls are a missing link,' said Wolf-Chase, 'between the very
young embryonic stars buried in dark filaments and newborn stars blowing
the bubbles.'
'If you wind the clock backwards from the bubbles, you get the yellow ball features,' said Kerton.
So far, the volunteers have identified more than 900 of these compact yellow features.
The next step for the researchers is to look at their distribution.
Many
appear to be lining the rims of the bubbles, a clue that perhaps the
massive stars are triggering the birth of new stars as they blow the
bubbles, a phenomenon known as triggered star formation.
If the effect is real, the researchers should find that the yellow balls statistically appear more often with bubble walls.
'These
results attest to the importance of citizen scientist programs,' said
Wolf-Chase. Kerton added, 'There is always the potential for
serendipitous discovery that makes citizen science both exciting for the
participants and useful to the professional astronomer.'
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