Would you like to volunteer to identify and classify galaxies? Here’s how to get involved

A new citizen science project launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Euclid Consortium, in which he collaborates Canary Islands Astrophysical Institute (IAC) and the Zooniverse platform, will allow that volunteers around the world to identify the shapes of millions of galaxies in images taken by ESA’s Euclid space telescope.

The objective of the initiative is to train deep neural networks of artificial intelligence that will allow the creation of the largest catalogue of galactic morphology to date, according to the IAC.

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“In November 2023 and May 2024, the world got a taste of the quality of ESA’s Euclid mission when its first images were made public, showing a wide variety of sources, from nearby nebulae to distant galaxy clusters. And this is just the beginning, as Euclid, in its mission to map the Universe, will continue to take images of hundreds of thousands of distant galaxies.“, details the IAC.

Over the next six years the mission is expected to send about 100 GB of data per day to Earth and Euclid will publish its first data catalogues for the scientific community starting in 2025, In the meantime, any volunteer for the Galaxy Zoo project can take a look at previously unpublished images from the telescope.

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The first dataset, containing tens of thousands of galaxies selected from over 800,000 images, is now available on the platform awaiting classification.

“If you take part in the project, you could be the first to see the latest images from Euclid. And not only that, you could also be the first human to see the galaxy in the image.”, he points out Marc Huertas-Company, researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC) and responsible for the scientific exploitation of the satellite in the Euclid Consortium for the characterization of the structure of galaxies.

The image shows 1,000 galaxies belonging to the Perseus cluster and more than 100,000 more distant galaxies in the background, each containing hundreds of billions of stars.

Many of these faint galaxies have never been seen before and some are so far away that Its light has taken 10 billion years to reach Earth.

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The IAC says that these classifications are not only useful for their immediate scientific potential, but also as a training set for artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms.