Power of the people : Using citizen science to power big data astronomy

Author / Creator

PERC SM21 (2021)

Conferences

PERC SM21 Poster Session 1B (2021)

Available as

Online

Summary

"The Hobby-Eberly Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) will find over one million galaxies that are 9 billion to 11 billion light-years away, and will yield the largest map of the universe ever produced...

"The Hobby-Eberly Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) will find over one million galaxies that are 9 billion to 11 billion light-years away, and will yield the largest map of the universe ever produced. Over the past year, I have used Zooniverse, the worlds largest citizen science platform, to train participants all over the world to efficiently classify these galaxies. The map will allow us to measure how fast the universe was expanding at different times in its history. Changes in the expansion rate will reveal the role of dark energy at different epochs, but the most difficult task is determining which galaxies come from our epoch of interest (at z~2-3) and which ones are nearby. These one million sources require visual classification for the most accurate results, an amount not feasible to handle from within the collaboration. The project, Dark Energy Explorers, has been live for 3 months and we have already had over 1.5 million classifications. I will discuss the methods we have used and how citizen science can be applied to big data astronomy and how we have preliminarily applied machine learning.

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