Science and nature · May 2026

Volunteers doubled the known brown dwarfs near the Sun

Brown dwarfs are bodies too large to be planets and too small to shine as stars, and they give off only a faint infrared glow. Over ten years, about 200,000 volunteers on the Zooniverse project Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 flipped through images from NASA's WISE and NEOWISE telescopes looking for faint dots that move. They found more than 3,000 new brown dwarfs, doubling the known number. Of the 75 authors on the resulting paper, 61 are volunteers, including Walter Ruben Robledo of Córdoba, Argentina, who said "dreams do come true."

Source: NASA Science, 2026-05-05

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