Citizen scientists find a failed star in the Sun’s neighborhood

While it would have been tempting to simply have computers scan the images for changes, that’s difficult with brown dwarfs. They tend to be faint, and it’s all too easy for a machine to gloss over that info or spend too much time on useless data. Castro and crew not only detected something a computer would likely miss, they found a particularly faint brown dwarf — it’s possible that a full-time