Find Exoasteroids and Peek into the Future

This is an artist’s concept of exoasteroids in space, featuring rocky asteroids of various sizes orbiting around a distant star. The scene depicts a dense asteroid belt, illuminated by the bright light of a star in the background, with dust and debris scattered throughout the space between the asteroids.
Join the new Exoasteroids project and search for white dwarfs that are devouring planetary systems.
NASA/JPL-Caltech

What will remain of our solar system a few billion years from now?  We’re launching the Exoasteroids project to gather some clues. Join this new citizen science project, and help search for variable white dwarfs – bizarre objects that we can catch in the act of disassembling planetary systems.

White dwarfs each pack the mass of a star into a ball the size of a planet. They are also the future of our solar system.  A few billion years from now, the Sun will evolve into a red giant and then into a white dwarf, devouring the innermost planets and millions of asteroids in the process.

With the Exoasteroids project, you’ll search for white dwarfs that are growing brighter or dimmer.  Such white dwarfs may be remnants of planetary systems still actively munching on asteroids, leading to outbursts detectable in images from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) space telescope.

Help us find planetary remains and disintegrating asteroids in other solar systems!

Anyone with a laptop or cell phone can participate. Participation does not require citizenship in any particular country.

@DoNASAScience
@DoNASAScience

Share

Details

Last Updated
Sep 23, 2024
Editor
NASA Science Editorial Team

Related Terms

Explore More

A collage of space-themed citizen science project logos, including 'Milky Way Project,' 'Exoplanet Explorers,' 'Cool Neighbors,' 'Disk Detective,' and 'Backyard Worlds: Planet 9.
2 min read

NASA’s NEOWISE Spacecraft Re-Enters Atmosphere, But More Discoveries Await!

Article20 hours ago
A young woman with curly blonde hair wearing a cozy sweater smiles at the camera, standing in a modern hallway with plants in the background.
2 min read

Sadie Coffin Named Association for Advancing Participatory Sciences/NASA Citizen Science Leaders Series Fellow

Article20 hours ago
The top-left half of the image is a Hubble Space Telescope view of a 100-billion-mile-wide disk of dust around the summer star Vega. The disk is represented in blue. The color trails to white as we get closer to the center of the disk. The black spot at the center blocks out the bright glow of the hot young star. The disk is perfectly circular because we are looking down on top of it. The lower-right half of the image is a view from the James Webb Space Telescope, which reveals the glow of warm dust in the disk's halo that is colored orange. The disk is brighter toward the center. There is a notable dip in surface brightness between the inner and outer disk.
6 min read

NASA’s Hubble, Webb Probe Surprisingly Smooth Disk Around Vega

Article4 days ago