---
title: "Disk Detective"
chunk: 2/2
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_Detective"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:14:17.830855+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

The Disk Detective project discovered the first example of a Peter Pan disk. At the 235th meeting of the American Astronomical Society the discovery of four new Peter Pan disks was presented. Three objects are high-probability members of the Columba and Carina stellar associations. The forth object has an intermediate likelihood of being part of a moving group. All four objects are young M dwarfs.
The project has also discovered the first debris disk with a white dwarf companion (HD 74389) and a new kind of M dwarf disk (WISE J080822.18-644357.3) in a moving group. The project found 37 new disks (including HD 74389) and four Be stars in the first paper and 213 newly-identified disk candidates in the third paper. Together with WISE J080822.18-644357.3, the Disk Detective project found 251 new disks or disk candidates. The third paper also found HD 150972 (WISEA J164540.79-310226.6) as a likely member of the Scorpius–Centaurus moving group, 12 candidates that are co-moving binaries and 31 that are closer than 125 parsec, making them possible targets for direct imaging of exoplanets.
Additionally, the project published the discovery a nearby young brown dwarf with a warm class-II type circumstellar disk, WISEA J120037.79−784508.3 (W1200−7845), located in the ε Chamaeleontis association. Found 102 parsecs (~333 lightyears) from the Sun, this puts it within the solar neighborhood, making it ideal for study since brown dwarfs are very faint due to their low masses of about 13-80 MJ. Therefore, it is within distance to observe greater details if viewed with large telescope arrays or space telescopes. W1200-7845 is also very young, with measurements putting it at about 3.7 million years old, meaning that—along with its relatively close proximity—it could serve as a benchmark for future studies of brown dwarf system formation.
A study with JWST MIRI found that the disk around WISEA J044634.16-262756.1B, which was first discovered by the Disk Detective project, has a carbon-rich disk. The study found clear evidence that the disk has long-lived primordial gas. 14 molecules were found within the disk, many of them being hydrocarbons.

== False positive rate and applications ==
The project did make estimates about the amount of high-quality disk candidates in AllWISE and lower-limit false-positive rates for several catalogs, based on classification false-positive rates, follow-up imaging and literature review. Out of the 149,273 subjects on the Disk Detective website 7.9±0.2% are likely candidates. 90.2% of the subjects are eliminated by website evaluation, 1.35% were eliminated by literature review and 0.52% were eliminated by high-resolution follow-up imaging (Robo-AO + Dupont/Retrocam). From this result AllWISE might contain ~21,600 high quality disk candidates and 4-8% of the disk candidates from high-quality surveys might show background objects in high-resolution images, which are bright enough to affect the infrared excess.
The project also has a database that is available through the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST). It contains the "goodFraction", describing how often a source was voted as a good source on the website, as well as other information about the source, such as comments from the science team, machine learned classification, cross-matched catalog information and SED fits.
A group at MIT did use the Disk Detective classifications to train a machine-learning system. They found that their machine-learning system agreed with user identifications of debris disks 97% of the time. The group has found 367 promising candidates for follow-up observations with this method.

== See also ==

Exoplanet
Kuiper belt
Planetesimal
Protoplanetary disk
T Tauri star
WISEA J120037.79-784508.3
Zooniverse projects:

== References ==

== External links ==
NASA's Disk Detective page
Disk Detective official website
Disk Detective Facebook page
Disk Detective Twitter page
Disk Detective project blog