In a recent vote for citizen-science help in studies, particularly space-oriented ones, approximately 37,000 citizen investigators looked through 430,000 images to give assistance in finding 29 new, potential gravitational lenses. The program was through Space Warps, a classification system that exists online and provides a framework for citizen scientists to search for lenses, according to a release.
So, what's a gravitational lens? It's a galaxy in which the gravity treats light differently than usual: It bends the light from other galaxies and reshapes the image. Essentially, the galaxies are more strongly "lensed" and can be studied by astronomers and others using equipment that might not work for other galaxies. They are also framed by dark matter, which contributes to the effect, noted the release.
These areas are unusual, and only about 500 have been discovered so far. However, with a huge number of images having been taken by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey (CFHTLS), it was useful to have extra viewers run through and select them. The findings will appear in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Human eyes worked better for the project, because while computer algorithms can sometimes notice gravitational lenses, they often overlook images that seem similar to other galaxies' images, as Anupreeta More, with Space Warps and the University of Tokyo's Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, said in the release.
"All that was needed was the ability to recognise patterns of shapes and colours," said citizen scientist and paper co-author Christine Macmillan from Scotland, in the release. "It was fascinating to look at galaxies so far away, and realize that there is another behind it, even further away, whose light gets distorted in an arc."
Researchers at Stanford University and University of Oxford were also involved, as the release said.