It didn’t take long for the Backyard Worlds project from NASA to yield a discovery. Earlier this year, NASA launched the tool, which allows the public to help search for possibly undiscovered worlds.

The tool was designed to help astronomers pinpoint new worlds outside of our solar system, and four users recently alerted NASA to just that. The users found a brown dwarf about 100 light years away from the sun. The object has since been confirmed by an infrared telescope.

Brown dwarfs, sometimes called "failed stars," are spread throughout the Milky Way. They lack enough mass to sustain nuclear fusion, but they are hot enough to glow in the infrared range of the light spectrum.

"Brown dwarfs are strikingly similar to Jupiter so we study their atmospheres in order to look at what weather on other worlds might look like," said Jonathan Gagné, a Backyard Worlds team member from the Carnegie Institution for Science.

An artist's impression of the planet Proxima b orbiting the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Solar System. Credit: Nasa handout

The Backyard Worlds project lets anyone with a computer and an internet connection flip through images taken by NASA's Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft. If an object is close enough to Earth, it will appear to "jump" when multiple images taken of the same spot in the sky years apart are compared. The goal for the project is to crowdsource and have many sets of eyes on the pictures, in an attempt to notice small, but significant things. So far, the more than 37,000 volunteers have classified more than 4 million flipbooks.

Days after the Backyard Worlds website debuted on February 15, Bob Fletcher, a science teacher in Tasmania identified a faint object moving across the WISE images. It was soon also flagged by three other citizen scientists from Russia, Serbia, and the United States.

The object was originally called “Bob’s dwarf,” and was later confirmed as a previously unknown brown dwarf just a few hundred degrees warmer than Jupiter. The authors say that sky surveys had missed this object because it's too faint. All four volunteers are co-authors on the scientific paper announcing the discovery.

The new brown dwarf, circled. Credit: Nasa

"I was so proud of our volunteers as I saw the data on this new cold world coming in," said Jackie Faherty, a senior scientist in the American Museum of Natural History's Department of Astrophysics and one of Backyard World's researchers. "It was a feel-good moment for science."

The Astrophysical Journal Letters paper can be found here.