Nasa has launched a new Zooniverse citizen science project to get you hunting for extrasolar dusty disks, planetary precursors, among 500,000 unidentified objects in the sky.

Disk Detective features images captured by the space agency's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (Wise), which between 2010 and 2011 captured one of the most detailed views of the Universe in infrared in four different wavelengths. The team at the Goddard Space Flight Center wants to use this data to get the public to identify the early beginnings of planets.

As we understand it, planetary systems are formed when gravity pulls particles in a collapsing cloud of dust and ionized gases together until a hot core develops to form a star. The remaining particles begin to rotate until eventually a flattened disk forms. Particles clump together to form planetesimals, which in turn eventually form planets. Details however, are scarce, and Nasa is hoping to zero in on as many of these dusty disks as possible to study them in more detail.

The 500,000 infrared objects captured by Wise have already been narrowed down from 745 million objects captured—they've only included the brightest, at wavelengths of 22 microns—and additional objects have been added from optical images captured by the Digitized Sky Survey. However among those 500,000 are also distant galaxies, nebulae, and asteroids, all of which also glow infrared. Each object will look different, so it's hard for a computer algorithm to classify each. Nasa is therefore calling on the public to qualify each image by going through a video and selecting one or more of six descriptions set by the team. These include simple questions asking whether there are multiple objects in view, or whether they go outside of the circle targeting them. The idea is to spot those dusty disks that radiate infrared light, representing different stages of planetary formation depending on what they contain and how hot they are.

"Planets form and grow within disks of gas, dust and icy grains that surround young stars, but many details about the process still elude us," Marc Kuchner, an astrophysicist at Nasa, commented in a statement. "We need more examples of planet-forming habitats to better understand how planets grow and mature."

The team is actually seeking two types of disks, which would represent planetary formation at different stages. One is a young stellar object disk younger than five million years, the other is a debris disk older than five million years. The former is still surrounded by large quantities of gas and found in clusters, while the latter is typically gas-light and littered with rocky and icy debris that look like asteroid belts.

According to the Disk Detectives site, some of the questions they are hoping to one-day answer using the information produced from the project include why the disks are asymmetric and what causes planets to migrate around inside the disks. The team also wants to find out if young stellar objects could form outside of the usual environments we know of, such as in clusters, and likewise for debris disks whether or not they can form around stars that are more evolved than our own Sun.

Disk Detectives is backed by Nasa's Science Innovation Fund and the team plans on publishing results gained from the project.

This story originally appeared on Wired UK.