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In November 2023, then in May 2024, the world got its first glimpse of the quality of the images provided by Euclid, with a variety of targeted sources : from nearby nebulae to distant galaxy clusters. In the background of each of these images are hundreds of thousands of distant galaxies.
Over the next six years, the probe is expected to send back to Earth images of hundreds of thousands of distant galaxies, representing a daily volume of around 100 GB of data.
The effort required to label this phenomenal amount of data is considerable. That’s why, under the aegis of ESA, the European Space Agency, the scientists of the Euclid consortium have joined forces with the Galaxy Zoo platform, offering the public an opportunity to help them identify the shape of thousands of galaxies.
| The Galaxy Zoo project was first launched in 2007. At the time, the aim was to classify the shapes of a million galaxies from images taken by the Sloan Digital Sky Galaxy Zoo has been operational for 17 years. Over 400,000 people have classified galaxy shapes from other projects and telescopes, including NASA/ESA’s Hubble. Also read the article : "Help astronomers locate black holes with LOFAR Radio Galaxy Zoo" |
Euclid will release its first data catalogs to the scientific community in 2025. Already, however, volunteers to the new Galaxy Zoo project can take a look at never-before-seen images from the space telescope.
An initial data set, containing tens of thousands of galaxies selected from over 800,000 images, has been produced by the Galaxy Zoo project team. It has been made available on the platform [link ????] and awaits your help in classifying it.
The fruit of training for AI
Your intervention will serve not only for its immediate scientific potential, but also as a training ground for artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms.
Without human intervention, AI algorithms have difficulty classifying galaxies. With coordination between humans and machines, it is expected that AI will eventually be able to accurately classify an unlimited number of galaxies.
At Zooniverse, the team has developed an AI algorithm called ZooBot ; it will first sift through Euclid’s images, then analyze them.
After being trained in these human classifications, ZooBot will be integrated into the Euclid catalogs to provide detailed classifications for hundreds of millions of images, making it the largest scientific catalog to date and enabling a new science.
Ultimately, this work will help us to understand the evolution of galaxy shape over time, and the mechanisms by which this happens.
One of the main architects of this initiative, a researcher from Observatoire de Paris - PSL, is in charge of the "Morphology" working group within Euclid.