Backyard Worlds: Planet 9

First of all, here are some of our citizen scientists.

Several Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 citizen scientists are featured on NASA websites! Click on the names to learn more about Peter Ansorge, Dan Caselden, Rosa Castro, Guillaume Colin, Les Hamlet, Frank Kiwy, Jorg Schumann, Tamara Stajic, Vinod Thakur, and Melina Thevenot

Core Science Team

Jackie Faherty (American Museum of Natural History) is a staff scientist in the department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History. She received her Ph.D. from Stony Brook University in 2010 with a dissertation entitled "The Brown Dwarf Kinematics Project". Dr. Faherty's research group entitled Brown Dwarfs in New York City (BDNYC) looks at the intersection of the observable properties of brown dwarfs and giant exoplanets. She has a keen interest in the atmospheres of the coldest brown dwarfs and how they resemble those of Jupiter. Follow her on Twitter @jfaherty!

Marc Kuchner (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center) is the Principal Investigator (PI) of Backyard Worlds: Planet 9. Marc got his bachelor's degree from Harvard, his Ph.D. from Caltech, and completed one postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and one at Princeton. He has worked on theory, observations and instrumentation, mostly related to extrasolar planets, circumstellar disks, or planet formation. At Caltech, Marc was a graduate student of Mike Brown, who is also now searching for planet nine. Marc is also the PI of Disk Detective, another popular Zooniverse citizen science project, which also uses data from WISE. You can follow him on Twitter @marckuchner

Davy Kirkpatrick is an astronomer at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. His research helped define the L, T, and Y classes of brown dwarfs. Davy is also credited with first using the name "Tyche" to refer to a heretofore unseen, low-mass Solar companion in the Oort Cloud.

Aaron Meisner (NSF's NOIRLab) is a staff scientist at NSF's NOIRLab in Tucson, Arizona. He went to college at Stanford and earned a Ph.D. from Harvard in 2015. He specializes in processing large data sets of astronomical images. Lately he’s been analyzing millions of WISE images in search of planet nine.

Adam Schneider (USNO) Adam Schneider received his PhD from the University of Georgia and is currently a research scientist at George Mason University and the US Naval Observatory. He is an observational astronomer whose research focuses on identifying and characterizing late-type stars and brown dwarfs in the Solar neighborhood. He is particularly interested in the nearest systems, as well as young, nearby systems and how such objects can aid in our understanding of the diversity of extrasolar planets as well as the star formation history of the local neighborhood.

Collaborators

Daniella C. Bardalez Gagliuffi is a Kalbfleisch Fellow at the American Museum of Natural History. Originally from Lima, Peru, she obtained her BS from MIT and PhD from UC San Diego. Dr. Bardalez Gagliuffi is an observational astronomer with extensive experience with near infrared spectroscopy. Daniella’s research focuses on the identification and characterization of binary systems of brown dwarfs, and she is interested in finding planetary-mass companions to brown dwarfs to test formation theories. Follow her on Twitter @astro_daniella!

Adam Burgasser is a Professor in the Department of Physics at UC San Diego and an observational astrophysicist investigating the lowest mass stars, coldest brown dwarfs, and exoplanets. He uses a variety of ground-based and space-based telescopes to research the physical properties and processes of these objects, including: optical and near-infrared spectroscopy to explore the atmospheres of MLTY dwarfs; high resolution laser guide star adaptive optics imaging and high resolution spectroscopy to search for and characterize low-mass multiple systems; radio, optical and X-ray observations to study magnetic activity; synoptic photometry and spectroscopy to investigate brown dwarf weather; and numerical simulations to characterize brown dwarf populations. He is best known for leading the definition of the T spectral class (part of his PhD thesis work), discovering metal-poor halo L subdwarfs, and investigating the remarkable L dwarf/T dwarf transition. Follow him on Twitter @browndwarfs!

Sarah Casewell is currently an STFC Ernest Rutherford Research Fellow at the University of Leicester in the UK. She received her PhD in 2007 from the University of Leicester where she researched both brown dwarfs and white dwarfs. Sarah is an observational astronomer working in the optical and infrared to study brown dwarfs in both wide and close binaries with white dwarfs. She is particularly interested in close systems where the brown dwarf has survived the death of the white dwarf and now is locked in an orbit of a few hours, subjecting the brown dwarf to high levels of irradiation.

Jonathan Gagne (Conseiller Scientifique / Scientific Advisor, Planétarium Rio Tinto Alcan | Espace pour la vie) Québécois Jonathan Gagne earned his Ph.D. from the University of Montreal. He's an expert on brown dwarfs, exoplanets and near-infrared spectroscopy. He also works on the Disk Detective citizen science project, helping identify objects that are in young moving groups with his BANYAN Sigma software.

Federico Marocco is a Scientific Research Associate at IPAC, California Institute of Technology. Originally from Fossano (Italy), Federico earned his bachelor’s degree at the Università degli Studi di Torino (Italy) and his PhD at the University of Hertfordshire (UK). Before joining IPAC, he worked at NASA JPL on generating the CatWISE2020 Catalog, an all-sky infrared catalog which provides measured position, motion and brightness at 3.4 and 4.6 µm for ~1.9 billion celestial objects. Federico is an expert in near-infrared spectroscopy and astrometry for the coldest brown dwarfs in the Solar neighborhood.

Interns

Michaela Allen is an undergraduate senior at Angelo State University in Texas studying physics and astronomy. She does research on hypersonic shock waves in RR Lyrae variable stars. She is also a current intern at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center working on looking at all of the moving objects discovered by citizen scientists through Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 that are not brown dwarfs. Follow Michaela on twitter @sasstronaut42 !

Susan Higashiro Weinreich. From Vancouver, Canada, Susan earned a BCom from TRU, and is currently completing an MSc in Space Studies at International Space University in Strasbourg, France.