In production: Project IX

Star formation loves infrared dark clouds

We all know and love Galaxy Zoo and the various Zooniverse projects that have sprung up in recent months – Solar Stormwatch and Moon Zoo to name a couple. And there’s more on the way. Since the start of the year I’ve been excited about getting involved in another Zooniverse startup, the yet to be named Project IX. Project IX will deal with an area of astronomy I’m particularly interested in, namely star formation.

Understanding how stars form, in the numbers, sizes and masses that we observe them all around us in the Galaxy, and how this process of star birth affects our Galaxy as a whole, are very fundamental astrophysical questions. Stars are the factories of the Universe: light elements are fused in each and every stellar core into heavier stuff – even into dust and ash as it nears the end of its lifetime. Stellar death then returns these new materials to the medium that surrounds it, either gently drifting away as the star loses its hold on the outer layers of its atmosphere, or ripping violently through space in a supernova explosion that is visible across the Universe.

Looking back at star formation in high-redshift galaxies has proven to be a very interesting field of study: do galaxies form stars continuously, or in bursts? What triggers it, and what makes it stop?

As we can’t resolve individual regions where stars are forming in the distant Universe, we look for spectral markers – light signatures that we know are signposts for star formation – and try to understand what’s happening simply by inference. To learn how these markers relate to real physical properties, our own Galaxy is an invaluable laboratory. Futhermore, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the formation of planets is a natural and common consequence of star birth, rather than some odd anomaly. We can’t hope to understand how planets form without knowing how their stellar host does, and vice versa.

Star formation takes place in dark nooks and crannies, mainly in our galactic disk, where material is densest. Not much visible light is emitted from these cold corners, and dust keeps the young star hidden while it accretes more matter. In the infrared, however, these cold spots can radiate quite brightly, and the infrared Spitzer Space Telescope has in recent years made a huge contribution to our understanding of star formation processes. And while Spitzer’s fuel for keeping the instrument cold ran out some time ago, we’re nowhere near done with extracting new information from its data.

For Project IX, we’re taking images from a large Spitzer imaging survey called GLIMPSE, and identifying a number of areas related to star formation that zooites can help in. These images are scientifically as well as visually stunning, so we’re pretty sure we can convince lots of people to donate their time to examine them and tell us what they see. Are you in? To get a taster, images from GLIMPSE and its companion survey MIPSGAL are on display here.

Rob, who is co-ordinating Project IX at Zooniverse Towers, also had the idea of opening up the process of how a Zooniverse project comes about up to the public. So he and Chris have been blogging about the project on the Zooniverse site. I’m really excited about being part of Project IX and am looking forward to it coming together – and all of us involved are licking our chops and sharpening our pencils for the great science we can do with the data. More to come!