ESA needs you to classify thousands of galaxies

If you’ve always dreamed of contributing to science and discovering unknown cosmic objects, the European Space Agency (ESA) offers you an exciting opportunity. Together with Galaxy Zoo, it has launched an ambitious citizen science project to catalogue tens of thousands of galaxies imaged by the Euclid Space Telescope. Not only does this project give astronomy enthusiasts the opportunity to participate in a major space mission, it also plays a crucial role in the investigation of dark matter and dark energy, two of the deepest mysteries of the Universe.

Ambitious Citizen Science Project

Launched in July 2023 and operational since February 2024 Euclid Space Telescope It is the focus of ESA's mission to explore the unseen aspects of our universe. Its mission is to study the influence of dark matter and dark energy, collectively called the “dark universe,” on the visible universe. To do this, it will image Billions of galaxies It will be sent almost every day. 100GB of data to Earth Over the next six years. To manage and analyse this vast amount of information, ESA is now calling on the community of citizen scientists.

Galaxy Zoo It is at the heart of this project. Since its inception in 2007, this citizen science platform has played a key role in classifying galaxies using images provided by renowned telescopes such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the James Webb Space Telescope. Users will now also have luck To work with Euclid data and help with that. Classification of observed galaxiesParticipants will be asked simple questions about the shape of galaxies, such as “Is the galaxy round?” or “Are there signs of spiral arms?”

Contributing to the future of astronomical research

Your participation in this project can make a real difference. By contributing to the galaxy classification, you will not only help researchers sort through a massive amount of data, but you will also play a crucial role in Training an AI algorithm called ZooBotThe latter is primarily designed to mimic human galaxy classification capabilities. However, this algorithm needs human data to learn and improve its performance.

Ultimately, this collaboration between human contributions and AI will make it possible to efficiently catalog the billions of galaxies observed by Euclid, facilitating the creation of a massive catalog of data for researchers.