Howdy Disk Detectives,

Just thought I’d give you an update on some goings on since our last blog post.

First of all—the project is now 59% complete!  That’s fantastic.  Keep up the good work, everybody!   The James Webb Space Telescope is set to launch next fall, and start taking science data in the spring of 2019.  Let’s try to finish up all the classification work by then!  I bet we can.

Disk Detective Milton Bosch visits NASA Headquarters.

Second of all, Goddard Space Flight Center held a “Citizen Science/Crowdsourcing Week” this summer, and Disk Detective’s own Dr. Milton Bosch came out to participate.  Milton also spent a day visiting NASA headquarters, talking to scientists and managers about how citizen science can help NASA.  The goal of the week was to encourage more scientists at Goddard and the rest of NASA to launch citizen projects and use crowdsourcing in their research. It was a huge success! There were nine talks on citizen science and crowdsourcing, and Milton met with 16 different scientists from all our scientific divisions at Goddard. We are planning to do it again next year; let us know if you might want to come down to Greenbelt, MD and participate!

Third of all, I can report that our ALMA proposal did not get selected.  But it was a near miss–and we are going to try again!  We submitted a proposal called “Sub-millimeter Observations of Long-lived Accretion Disks'”asking to measure submillimeter radiation from dust around WISE J080822.18-644357.3, the record-breaking disk we discovered plus a few other similar object. The review panel ranked the proposal in the second quartile and gave us a few tips on how to improve it for next round.

In other news, a handy new catalog of disks has appeared online: CircumstellarDisks.org. This catalog shows what we dream of at Disk Detective: disks that have been “resolved” by telescopes.  “Resolved” means that an image of the disk shows more than a dot of light; it actually has the shape of a disk, maybe even a disk with some structure.  Anyway, if you want to see some of the awesome images that keep us disk researchers motivated, take a peek at CircumstellarDisks.org.

Behind the scenes, the science team is busy working on papers about our follow-up observations from the FAST spectrograph, Robo AO, and the duPont telescope.  The advanced users group is vetting objects of interest for future proposals and looking for new moving groups.  And we’re finding lots of interesting disks!

Stay tuned for more news—and keep up the good searching!

Marc Kuchner