Discover Space Warps with the Euclid Space Telescope! The Euclid Consortium and the Zooniverse team are excited to launch a new Space Warps project, ‘Space Warps – ESA Euclid’, to find strong gravitational lenses in Euclid survey images. You can contribute to identifying systems that bend the fabric of space itself. Excited?
What is Space Warps?
The Space Warps project was first launched in 2013. Unlike Galaxy Zoo, which is mostly about morphological classifications of galaxies, the Space Warps team developed the first dedicated experiment to discover strong gravitational lenses following work on the serendipitous discovery of strong lenses in Galaxy Zoo. In the past decade, citizen scientists from all around the world have classified images from telescope surveys like the Hyper-Suprime Cam Survey and the Dark Energy Survey. Their contributions are incredibly useful and have immediate scientific potential, and they can also be used to train machine learning AI algorithms. Without being taught what to look for by humans, AI algorithms struggle to detect lenses, but together, humans and AI can accurately spot thousands of lenses.
What is the Euclid Space Telescope?
The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Euclid space telescope launched in July 2023 and has begun surveying the sky. Splitting the sky up into chunks, Euclid aims to take an image of each chunk and mosaic them together to produce the most detailed map of the Universe ever obtained. Euclid has been designed to look at a much larger region of the sky than the Hubble Space Telescope or the James Webb Space Telescope, meaning it can capture a wide range of different objects all in the same image – from faint to bright, from distant to nearby, from the most massive of galaxy clusters to the smallest nearby stars. With Euclid, we will get both a very detailed and very wide view of the sky all at once. The analysis of this rich data set is coordinated by the international Euclid Consortium, whose 2600+ members from 18 countries are working on various problems regarding astrophysics and cosmology. Above all, their goal is to constrain the nature of dark matter and dark energy, and to answer fundamental questions on how galaxies form and evolve.
In November 2023 and May 2024, the world got its first glimpses at the quality of Euclid’s images with Euclid’s Early Release Observations which targeted a variety of astronomical objects, from nearby nebulae, to distant clusters of galaxies. Space Warps – Euclid is the first chance for the public to preview cutouts of images from Euclid’s upcoming Quick 1 (Q1) data release. Euclid captures so many galaxies – the team selected and prepared 100,000 for this campaign through the ESA Datalabs digital platform – that almost every image will have never been seen before. Scientists in the Zooniverse team and the Euclid Consortium hope that among these images are new and strange discoveries waiting to be found.
(Credit: Background image of Perseus cluster: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre, CEA Paris-Saclay; G. Anselmi.)
Find the needles in a haystack – spot the elusive hidden distant galaxies using the power of gravitational lensing in exquisite new Euclid data!
Massive galaxies warp space-time, bending light rays so that we can see around them to even more distant galaxies. These gravitational lenses are very rare and yet volunteers have helped us find hundreds of new candidates in previous searches. In this new project, citizen scientists will inspect new high-quality imaging data from the ESA Euclid Space Telescope, in which many previously unknown strong lenses will be hiding.
We can expect many new lenses, more than we have discovered before, to be revealed in this unprecedented Euclid dataset. The Euclid Consortium’s experts will improve their scientific analysis tools using data from the citizen scientists, which will help them find even more interesting lens images in the future. In turn, the statistical analysis of hundreds of lenses may also reveal new information about dark matter and dark energy, which is among the main goals of Euclid.
We are very excited to ask members of the public for their help inspecting the lens candidates. All you need is simple access to the internet to make a meaningful contribution to this exciting project. We’ve been blown away by the response so far, with over 200,000 classifications in just a few days! We’re aiming to collect 500,000 classifications for the first round of images – given your success in the past, we think we can inspect all of these images in a week!
Join us and be a cosmic lens hunter!
To get started, please visit: spacewarps.org
Some more background information
How many images will be classified?
Roughly 100,000 small images (cutouts) will be classified through the Zooniverse interface to citizen scientists. These are all extracted from the Euclid Q1 data release. Citizen scientists will see four color settings per cutout that utilize Euclid’s visible and near-infrared instruments to enable them to discern strong lensing features. The classification is a simple yes/no task where the citizens provide a single marker and then quickly move on to the next image. It has been deliberately designed to be fast so that citizens can click through as many images as possible. Most of what they will see will not be a strong lens given their rarity.
Some of the images they will see will contain simulated gravitational lenses painted onto galaxies selected from the Q1 catalogs. These serve two purposes, (1) training of the citizens in recognising strong gravitational lenses, (2) allowing us to determine a crowd probability for a given image containing a gravitational lens or not. Some images shown have been labeled as possibly containing a strong lens by a machine learning (ML) classifier and others have not. Human visual inspection is crucial for cleaning samples of lens candidates by ML, that can still contain objects that mimic strong lenses, and also to understand what the machines might be missing. Eventually, the information from the citizens will be incorporated into the training of ML algorithms that experts in the Euclid Consortium are developing.
How is it different from what was done in August?
This is an entirely different experiment to the Galaxy Zoo: Euclid project launched in August. In Space Warps – Euclid we focus solely on screening a large number of images for gravitational lens candidates. Galaxy Zoo: Euclid on the other hand was an experiment to obtain labels on the diverse morphologies of galaxies and mergers. While a handful of strong lenses were identified serendipitously in the Galaxy Zoo: Euclid project, we expect many more to exist in the Euclid Q1 dataset (~400). Exciting discoveries of strong gravitational lenses await!
