Crowdsourcing helped find the "yellow balls" - a new type of space objects

Fans of astrophysics through the Internet have studied thousands of images from the Spitzer telescope and made a real scientific discovery. They revealed a new class of space objects, which were called “yellow balls” (yellow balls), according to NASA.

It is the link between emerging star germs and newborn stars.

“After the volunteers tortured us with the question of what these“ yellow balls ”are, we studied their physical properties and nature and realized that these objects allow us to follow the first phases of the birth of large luminaries. We can say that the simple question “hmm what it is” led us to a discovery, ”said Charles Kerton of the University of Iowa in Ames (USA).
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The research is being carried out as part of the Milky Way crowdsourcing project on the classification of objects in our galaxy using infrared images from Spitzer. The project is part of a larger Zooniverse initiative.

To date, volunteers have already classified 1 513 131 objects, including found 582 781 gas bubbles blown out by young stars. At some point, a discussion broke out on the project's forum about incomprehensible objects that were called “yellow balls”. The question was whether to consider them as gas bubbles or not.

Scientists are interested in the question - and also paid attention to these objects. A close study has shown that these are actually not bubbles, but very large stars that are just beginning to be born. Due to the large number of grains of aromatic hydrocarbons in the surrounding gas, the cloud acquires a "green" shade in the infrared range, which in a mixture with red creates the impression of yellow. Over time, the "yellow" cloud acquires a typical "red" color in the infrared.



Volunteers were able to find about 900 such objects in the pictures of Spitzer. Now we need to analyze their distribution in order to more accurately determine the nature of the phenomenon.

The online community continues to classify objects in the universe. Thanks to the efforts of Zooniverse more than 70 scientific papers have been published.