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

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.

50 pages, accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal

References in corpus (16)

• The 2.5 m Telescope of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• Two Suns in The Sky: Stellar Multiplicity in Exoplanet Systems
• Formation and Evolution of Planetary Systems (FEPS): Properties of Debris Dust around Solar-type Stars
• Spitzer observations of the Orion OB1 association: disk census in the low mass stars
• Do Two Temperature Debris Disks Have Multiple Belts?
• Gl86B: a white dwarf orbits an exoplanet host star
• High-efficiency Autonomous Laser Adaptive Optics
• A Sensitive Identification of Warm Debris Disks in the Solar Neighborhood Through Precise Calibration of Saturated WISE Photometry
• A Survey for Massive Giant Planets in Debris Disks with Evacuated Inner Cavities
• The SDSS-2MASS-WISE Ten Dimensional Stellar Color Locus
• Gap Clearing by Planets in a Collisional Debris Disk
• The multiplicity of exoplanet host stars - Spectroscopic confirmation of the companions GJ3021B and HD27442B, one new planet host triple-star system, and global statistics
• High-resolution, H band Spectroscopy of Be Stars with SDSS-III/APOGEE: I. New Be Stars, Line Identifications, and Line Profiles
• Searching for Planets in Holey Debris Disks with the Apodizing Phase Plate
• A deep catalogue of classical Be stars in the direction of the Perseus Arm: spectral types and interstellar reddenings
• Investigation of Star Formation toward the Sharpless 155 H II region

Cited by in corpus (13)

• Peter Pan Disks: Long-lived Accretion Disks Around Young M Stars
• Planet Four: Terrains - Discovery of Araneiforms Outside of the South Polar Layered Deposits
• Stellar parameters of Be stars observed with X-shooter
• Exploring the possibility of Peter Pan discs across stellar mass
• The TESS Triple-9 Catalog II: a new set of 999 uniformly-vetted exoplanet candidates
• What's Behind the Elephant's Trunk? Identifying Young Stellar Objects on the Outskirts of IC1396
• Disks in Nearby Young Stellar Associations Found Via Virtual Reality
• Chandra Observations of Six Peter Pan Disks: Diversity of X-ray-driven Internal Photoevaporation Rates Doesn't Explain Their Rare Longevity
• Seeking echoes of circumstellar disks in Kepler light curves
• Infrared excesses in stars with and without planets using revised $WISE$ photometry
• Takeout and Delivery: Erasing the Dusty Signature of Late-stage Terrestrial Planet Formation
• Three new late-type stellar companions to very dusty WISE debris disks identified with VLT/SPHERE imaging
• The SATCHEL pipeline: A general tool for data classified through citizen science