The security researcher who built his own sky-searching tools, then found a world that glows
Massachusetts, USA · Dan Caselden
Published July 19, 2026
Dan Caselden looks for cold, starless worlds in his spare time. The one he found is doing something nobody can explain yet.
The story
The person and the place
By day, Dan Caselden is a computer security researcher. In his own hours he is a citizen scientist with Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, a NASA-funded project that invites anyone at all to comb through spacecraft data for brown dwarfs, the objects too large to be planets and too small to be stars.
The problem he cared about
Brown dwarfs are cold, faint, and very good at hiding. Volunteers were scanning by eye, one frame at a time. "They're really hard to find," Caselden says. "It's the needle in the haystack problem, which is so much fun."
The agency moment
He did not just click through the images he was handed. With fellow volunteer Paul Westin he built WiseView, which scrolls through survey data like a short movie so that anything moving gives itself away, and he went on to write machine learning code for the search. Astronomer Adam Schneider used WiseView to confirm that an object he had noticed years earlier was moving fast.
Through the project, Caselden found W1935, a world larger than Jupiter and smaller than a star, drifting with no sun of its own. When Jackie Faherty's team pointed the James Webb Space Telescope at it, the methane in its atmosphere was not absorbing light the way everyone expected. It was glowing, the signature of an aurora, on an object with no star to spark one. Faherty: "We expected to see methane because it's common in these dwarfs. But instead of absorbing light, it was glowing." Nobody has explained it yet.
"It's chock full of really hard problems. And if you make any improvement, it's felt by the science team. You can see that what you do has an actual impact." — Dan Caselden, Discover Magazine
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Sources last verified July 20, 2026.