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   
      
   --- D'Bridge 3.99   
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