ESA enlists citizen scientists to map out the universe with Euclid

The European Space Agency seeks amateurs' help. In collaboration with the Galaxy Zoo service, ESA will encourage "citizen scientists" to participate in describing galaxies observed by the Euclid satellite.

The European Space Agency has embarked on a new initiative under its Euclid project, which aims to study the impact of dark matter and energy on the visible Universe. Collaborating with the Galaxy Zoo service, ESA has enabled amateurs, called "citizen scientists," to participate in this ambitious project by helping to describe the galaxies observed by the Euclid satellite. The first batch of images available for analysis contains thousands of photographs of distant galaxies.

The Euclid project, launched last year, resulted from a collaboration between ESA and NASA. As part of this mission, a telescope was sent into space to observe and study the impact of dark matter and dark energy on the visible Universe. The Euclid satellite observes distant galaxies, planning to study hundreds of millions of them. In the future, the telescope is expected to transmit hundreds of gigabytes of data daily, constituting a vast amount of images to interpret.

Due to this enormous amount of data, ESA decided to collaborate with the Galaxy Zoo service, which aims to engage amateurs in the process of analysing and describing galaxies. Although experts are expected to receive the first data only in 2025, in Galaxy Zoo, amateurs can already browse and analyse the images sent so far. This service already contains materials with tens of thousands of galaxies.

Volunteers who decide to participate in the project may be the first people in the world to see galaxies never before observed. They will be asked to answer a series of questions about the observed galaxies, such as whether a given galaxy has a circular shape, whether spiral arms are visible, and so on.

The Galaxy Zoo project was created in 2007 with the idea that volunteers could help describe a million galaxies observed under the Sloan Digital Sky Survey project. More than 40,000 people have described images of galaxies from various missions, including those provided by the Hubble and Webb space telescopes.

Amateur scientists' work has two main goals. First, their descriptions of galaxies will be helpful to scientists. Second, they will allow for better training in artificial intelligence, which will allow for independent image analysis in the future.

An algorithm named ZooBot is already operational in Galaxy Zoo. It initially automatically analyses images sent by Euclid. If the algorithm encounters difficulties interpreting an image, it transfers it to volunteers for analysis. After improvement, ZooBot will automatically catalogue images sent by Euclid showing hundreds of millions of galaxies.

Thanks to the Euclid mission, the largest catalogue of galaxies in history will be created, representing a significant leap forward in studying the Universe.