Brown dwarfs are notoriously difficult to find. These “failed stars” aren’t big enough to sustain nuclear fusion, and therefore aren’t as bright as more traditional main sequence stars. In fact, they’re nearly invisible in optical light, and faintly visible in infrared. But thanks to dozens of citizen scientists combing through archival infrared datasets from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), and a paper published in the Astronomical Journal detailing their work, we now have an additional set of over 3,000 candidate new brown dwarfs in our stellar neighborhood, more than doubling the total number found so far. The volunteers were part of Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, a Zooniverse project that has been running for around 10 years. Finding these particular worlds is a sweet spot for human pattern recognition - which makes it a great fit for crowd-source science projects.…