The Zooniverse citizen science project Space Warps recently reported that its online volunteers have helped to discover 29 new gravitational lenses, and 30 other possible lenses from the Canada France Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey. Not only are these important discoveries in their own right but they also prove just how good citizen scientists are at hunting down unusual objects. Credit; http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/science-blog/hunting-%E2%80%98halos%E2%80%99-universe-0
Thanks to the Internet, amateur volunteers known as “citizen scientists” can readily donate their time and effort to science–in fields ranging from medicine to zoology to astrophysics. The astrophysics project Space Warps offers a compelling example of why citizen science has become such a popular tool and how valuable it can be.
Late last year, in a pair of research papers, Space Warps announced the discovery of 29 new gravitational lenses. These arced or blobby features are distant galaxies whose light has been bent by the mass of foreground galaxies. This haul of lenses was obtained over an 8-month period by about 37,000 Space Warps volunteers who reviewed 430,000 digital images in a massive, online photo library. Automated computer programs have identified most of the ~500 gravitational lenses discovered to date. However, computers failed to flag the 29 lenses the Space Warps volunteers spotted.
“Human beings are very good at pattern recognition. The dynamic range that our eyes and our brains offer is much greater than a computer algorithm,” said Anupreeta More, Kavli IPMU. More and her colleagues designed Space Warps to take advantage of these human abilities. Space Warpers have also turned up a never-before-seen lensing scenario that looks like a red ring in the project’s image archive. Researchers are still working out the source of this red ring, which they suspect is the warped features of a background galaxy containing a supermassive black hole as well as regions of new star formation.
Among the most famous finds is Hanny’s Voorwerp, a galaxy-size gas cloud discovered in 2007 in a project called Galaxy Zoo, one of the earliest astronomy projects. As astronomical datasets continue to increase in size, there will be no shortage of opportunities for eager citizen scientists. For instance, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, opening in 2022, will collect 30 terabytes of data nightly as it observes the whole sky every few days from the vantage of the Southern Hemisphere. Computerized object-recognition programs will certainly play an important role in analyzing these data, but human volunteers are likely to remain integral.
Lintott, co-founder of Galaxy Zoo and principal investigator for the Zooniverse citizen science web portal, added: “Plus, a lot of unusual discoveries will need to be followed up, and I’d like to see citizen scientists get further into the process of analysis. Without them, I think we’re going to end up with a pile of interesting objects which professional scientists just don’t have time to deal with.” http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-01/tkf-wa011516.php  http://www.kavlifoundation.org/science-spotlights/crowdsourcing-universe-how-citizen-scientists-are-driving-discovery#.Vp0N2dKrTn4
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