buff.ly/3EOWgcS⠀ Overlooked Exoplanet Found by Citizen Scientists⠀ ⠀ A new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal details the discovery of a massive exoplanet that could be a brown dwarf, orbiting at a huge distance from its star: over 1,600 astronomical units away. Remember, an astronomical unit is the average distance from the Earth to the Sun, so this giant of a planet is 1,600 times farther away. We haven’t found a lot of planets at that type of distance from their host stars.⠀ ⠀ Now, one of the coolest pieces of this story is that this particular exoplanet was discovered by a volunteer citizen scientist looking at data in the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project.⠀ ⠀ IMAGE: At left, the NASA WISE image of the BD+60 1417AB system. At right bottom is the host star and companion, and at top right is a zoom-in on the new low-mass world. The image is a color-composite from multiple WISE bands. CREDIT: Backyard Worlds collaborator Léopold Gramaize⠀ ⠀ #planetaryscience #exoplan...