Astronomy has taken giant leaps since Galileo first looked at the sky through his handmade telescope. Today, scientists study the sky from enormous observatories or incredibly complex spacecraft worth billions of dollars.
But this doesn’t mean that astronomy is a closed club, accessible only for the few chosen ones. On the contrary, the data collected so far is so vast, that scientists often turn to amateur enthusiasts for assistance in processing it as a part of so-called citizen science projects. All you need to do to participate is a device with access to the internet.
In this article, we explore some of the most compelling current space citizen science projects supported by agencies like NASA and ESA. You will also learn ways to help astronauts find remnants of dead planets, brown dwarfs, and traces of elusive dark energy. The only qualifications you need are the desire to explore and some time to spare.
Galaxy Zoo: Classifying Distant Galaxies
Galaxy Zoo is one of the oldest space projects in citizen science, first launched in 2007. At present, nearly 120,000 volunteers have participated in it. The main goal of the project is to study photos of deep space to classify distant galaxies. This data helps astronomers understand the evolutionary path of the universe and hypothesize its future.
Galaxy Zoo is one of the most successful citizen science projects in history. It helped identify a series of patterns in the formation of galaxies. Galaxy Zoo participants also discovered several very unusual formations that baffled astronomers. For instance, Hanny’s Voorwerp, or Hanny’s Object, is an odd green formation, currently believed to be the remnants of a small galaxy.
The immense popularity of Galaxy Zoo led to the launch of the Zooniverse website, a citizen science platform popular worldwide and held in high esteem. Almost all projects explored in this article, including Galaxy Zoo, are platformed on that website.
It’s important to note that Galaxy Zoo went through a series of iterations since its launch. Initially, the participants analyzed images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, later moving onto Hubble images, then the data from Subaru and James Webb observatories. At present, the project’s participants are focusing on the images from European telescope Euclid. It was launched in 2023 to study dark matter and dark energy — invisible forces that, according to scientists, make up 95% of the known universe. Euclid conducts highly accurate redshift surveys of galaxies located more than 10 billion light years away from the Milky Way.
The project’s participants analyzed Euclid images, picking those that fit most of the criteria that describe a galaxy: Is there a disc? Are there spiral arms? Is it on the impact course with another galaxy?
It’s also worth noting that Galaxy Zoo has branched out over the years, namely with the projects searching for supernovae, galactic collisions, and active galaxies. At the moment, these spin-offs have run their course. But there is little doubt that, as more and more data accumulates, scientists will once more appeal to the astronomy enthusiasts for help.
If you’d like to take part in the Galaxy Zoo project, follow this link.
The Sungrazer Project: Searching for Sungrazing Comets
When the space observatory SOHO was launched by NASA and ESA in 1995, nobody could have predicted that it would prove to be an incredibly efficient hunter of sungrazing comets. The perihelion of these comets occurs really close to our star, hence their name. Typically, their size is rather small, ranging between 10 and 50 meters, so they tend to be vaporized upon approach to the Sun. This was the tragic fate of the Halloween comet C/2024 S1 (ATLAS) that recently perished.
At the moment of SOHO’s launch, astronomers were aware of only a few dozen sungrazing comets. But once the observatory commenced work, the mission managers were amazed to discover that SOHO captured sungrazers very often, sometimes up to ten such comets over a single week.
NASA launched the Sungrazer Project with the aim to systematize their comet search. The participants have free access to the images from the observatory which they can download and study to find new comets. When a new object is spotted, the participants fill out a discovery form on the project website.
This approach proved to be incredibly fruitful. At present, over 5,000 sungrazing comets have been discovered using SOHO images, half of which was the work of Sungrazer project participants.
If you’d like to take part in the Sungrazer Project and try your hand at finding your own comet, you can start by visiting the following link.
Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 and Searching for the Ninth Planet
In 2016, the astronomical community was shaken by an article making bold claims about the existence of a yet undiscovered massive planet on the outskirts of the Solar System. This hypothetical object was named Planet 9. A year after, on the eve of the discovery of the planet that was once believed to be Pluto, NASA kick-started the project with a rather eloquent title — Backyard Worlds: Planet 9.
Backyard Worlds participants analyze photos from NASA’s infrared telescope WISE in search of moving objects, both in the outskirts of the Solar System and across vast distances beyond it. The planetary candidates, as proposed by volunteers, are then reviewed by astronomers who choose the most promising objects for close observation.
Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 proved to be another fruitful endeavor. The project was joined by 80,000 astronomy enthusiasts who managed to identify over 1,500 previously unknown celestial objects. The majority of them are brown dwarfs — failed stars whose mass is too low to initiate a core thermonuclear reaction. Other interesting objects found by the project included white dwarfs with rings and even a hypervelocity star.
Given that Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 has no formal deadline, the participants continue to analyze relevant images. So who knows? Perhaps, one fortuitous day, a volunteer will indeed discover the notorious ninth planet.
If you’d like to take part in the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project, follow this link.
Dark Energy Explorers: The Hunt for Dark Energy
NASA’s Dark Energy Explorers project focuses on supporting astronomers who are searching for the answer to one of the fundamental questions of modern science — the nature of mysterious dark energy and how it influences the speed at which the universe expands.
Project’s volunteers analyze images of the celestial sphere taken over a five-year period by the HETDEX survey. The main goal is to search for galaxies between 9 and 11 billion light years from Earth. Unlike galaxies closer to us, these distant objects emit rays within a single wavelength range. When captured, distant galaxies appear as relatively faint flashes or dots.
NASA predicts that the project will help complete one of the largest maps of the universe ever created. It will also allow us to calculate the speed of the universe at different times in its history. In turn, this can help us understand how this process is influenced by dark energy and determine which current theory is closer to the truth.
All findings made by volunteers will also be used to train machine learning algorithms. The goal is to implement these systems for future process automation in data analysis, reducing the workload for astronomers.
If you’d like to take part in the Dark Energy Explorers project, follow this link.
Exoasteroids: Searching for Destroyed Exoplanets
Exoasteroids is the most recent project on this list. Launched in autumn 2024 by research and development center NOIRLab, the project aims to find white dwarfs in the remnants of destroyed planetary systems.
To find such systems, volunteers will examine time lapses of white dwarfs made by the aforementioned WISE telescope to detect changes in brightness. This could indicate that these white dwarfs are surrounded by planetary debris that remain under the bombardment of exoasteroids, appearing as flashes in photographs.
According to the project creators, this type of work is better performed by humans rather than algorithms. Automated search is more likely to produce false positive identifications of changes in white dwarfs. This is because the algorithm often mistakes image noise and other data artifacts, such as diffracted light from bright stars, for luminosity variation. So despite our rapid technological progress, the human eye is still a better instrument for this type of pattern recognition than algorithms.
If you’d like to take part in the Exoasteroids project, follow this link.
