Jonathan Gagné

Two spotlights placed side by side: from a distance, their light blends into one patch, and it seems there's a single source. The same happens in space: about 10–20% of faint stars are actually close pairs of identical stars. Individually, they can't be resolved, but together they shine noticeably brighter than a single star with the same parameters.

There are faint points in the sky that slowly crawl among the stars. They are cooler than embers in a fireplace and smaller than the Sun: these are brown dwarfs. There are so many of them that astronomers can't keep up with reviewing all the images. That's when volunteers stepped in: ordinary people examined pictures from the telescope and flagged moving objects.