The moment has come when there is now so much astronomical data encoded digitally, that those of us without high powered telescopes are no longer at a disadvantage. All we need is some hefty computing power and online access to the vast stores of data scattered across the planet. Oh, and a clever and subtle mind that can ask this data new and unforeseen questions.

The Internet's ability to draw distributed data into meaningful webs, treat the information as present and accessible, then process it into new knowledge is exactly what this project is all about. This story in the NY Times Telescopes of the World, Unite! A Cosmic Database Emerges is about The Virtual Observatory

In the first stage of the project this has meant creating tools that can search through different databases without requiring the searchers to be experts in their individual details. As a kind of shakedown cruise, the researchers at the National Virtual Observatory decided to focus on the data contained in two large sky surveys known as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which looks at the sky in the visible band of the spectrum and the Two Micron All Sky Survey, or 2MASS, which looks at the sky in the infrared.

"The reason we did those two is that they're very deep, they dig out objects that are very faint, much fainter than other surveys have been able to generate," said Dr. Bruce Berriman, a California Institute of Technology astronomer involved in the demonstration. "Because it goes to very faint objects you're able to dig out sources that are unusual or important in ways other projects can't do."

In particular, by combining the surveys they hoped to spot brown dwarfs. Brown dwarfs are essentially failed stars, lumps of matter bigger than a planet but not large enough to kindle the thermonuclear fire of a star. As a result, they are relatively cool, emit very little light and are therefore difficult to spot.

The temperature of a star, like that of a glowing piece of metal, determines the color of light that it emits: the cooler the star the redder the light. The light from the brown dwarfs that the astronomers were searching for straddles the border between the infrared and the visible. This means that a brown dwarf should appear in the very shortest wavelength band of the infrared 2MASS survey and also in the longest wavelength band of the visible Sloan survey.

An astronomer looking at just the data from, say, the Sloan survey and seeing an object in a single band would probably dismiss it.

"Chances are pretty good that that single band detection is a piece of junk, some sort of artifact in the detectors in the telescope, a glint off a bright star, any number of things," said Dr. Davy Kirkpatrick, a member of the Caltech team. But if that same object also appears in the 2MASS data then the chances shoot up that it is something worth looking at more closely.

The astronomers developed a program that could access these different databases and search them for matches. Within a few minutes the computer spit out a half a dozen or so candidates for possible brown dwarfs. Most of these had been previously noticed in the data, which others had sifted through manually.

Finding these brown dwarfs was supposed to be the goal of the demonstration, a debugging run to prove that the software worked. But the computer also found several candidates for new brown dwarfs.

"Astronomers' first reaction when you find a new result is that there's something wrong," Dr. Berriman said. But after looking at the data more closely "it slowly dawned on us that this was something real, that this was a brown dwarf we found."

"Then our eyes started to widen up a little bit at the prospect of what might be coming in the future," he continued.