A new approach to finding undiscovered objects buried in immense astronomical databases has produced an early and unexpected payoff: a new instance of a hard-to-find type of star known as a brown dwarf. Scientists working to create the National Virtual Observatory (NVO), an online portal for astronomical research unifying dozens of large astronomical databases, confirmed discovery of the new brown dwarf recently. The star emerged from a computerized search of information on millions of astronomical objects in two separate astronomical databases. Thanks to an NVO prototype, that search, formerly an endeavor requiring weeks or months of human attention, took approximately two minutes. “This was just supposed to be a feasibility demo. We just wanted it to find all the brown dwarfs that others could find, to show that this was a valid approach,” said Alex Szalay, director of the NVO project. “This was the first time we turned the NVO devices on, and they immediately yielded a new discovery from data that’s been publicly available for at least a year and a half.”
For the brown dwarf project, researchers wanted to show that they could use NVO connections they had built between two large databases — the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) — to confirm brown dwarfs already identified through previous non-NVO comparison of those databases. Until the NVO is fully operational, there’s always the (really neat!!!) NASA SkyView virtual observatory…