Disk Detective: Discovery of New Circumstellar Disk Candidates through Citizen Science

TL;DR

The Disk Detective citizen science project leverages public participation to identify new stars with circumstellar disks using WISE data, leading to the discovery of 37 new candidates, including unique systems and stellar phenomena.

Contribution

This study introduces a novel citizen science approach combined with multi-step vetting and follow-up spectroscopy to discover new circumstellar disk candidates from WISE data.

Findings

37 new disk candidates identified.

First debris disk around a star with a white dwarf companion discovered.

Four new classical Be stars found.

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.