Over the next six years, Euclid will transmit approximately 100 GB of data back to Earth daily. The sheer volume of data makes it impractical to rely solely on human effort for labeling.
To address this, ESA and Euclid consortium scientists have partnered with Galaxy Zoo, a citizen science project on the Zooniverse platform, inviting the public to help classify galaxy shapes.
Euclid's first data catalogues will be available to the scientific community starting in 2025. Meanwhile, volunteers on the Galaxy Zoo project can access previously unseen images from the telescope.
The first data set, comprising tens of thousands of galaxies from over 800,000 images, is now available on the platform, awaiting classification by volunteers. Participants may be the first to view Euclid's latest images and potentially discover new galaxies.
Launched in 2007, the Galaxy Zoo project initially called on the public to classify shapes of a million galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey images. Over 17 years, more than 400,000 participants have classified galaxy shapes from various projects and telescopes, including the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope.
These classifications serve as both immediate scientific data and training sets for Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms. AI alone struggles to classify galaxies without human guidance. However, combined efforts of humans and AI can achieve accurate classification of vast numbers of galaxies.
The Zooniverse team has developed an AI algorithm, ZooBot, which will preliminarily sort Euclid images, labeling simpler cases based on existing galaxy surveys. ZooBot will refer complex or ambiguous images to Galaxy Zoo users for classification, aiding its learning process.
Volunteers will examine galaxy images and answer questions such as, "Is the galaxy round?" or "Are there signs of spiral arms?" Post-training, ZooBot will be integrated into the Euclid catalogues, providing detailed classifications for hundreds of millions of galaxies, forming the largest scientific catalogue to date and enabling major new scientific discoveries.
The project utilizes the ESA Datalabs digital platform to produce numerous galaxy cutouts from Euclid images.
Related Links
Euclid at ESA
Stellar Chemistry, The Universe And All Within It
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