Citizen Astronomical Research - Identifying Unknown Galaxies

  • Hwang, Chorng-Yuan (PI)

Project Details

Description

Astronomy is the oldest science. Observations and identifications are the most important processin the study of astronomy; they provide the essential information ranging from the climaticvariations to large-scale structures of the universe. Besides scientific importance, lots ofobservational results of astronomy are related to our daily life and full of imagination.Astronomy is the science that has the most amateur participation. It has also been much easierfor people to share all kinds of astronomical information in the modern network-developedepoch. Recently, a variety of large-scale astronomical sky survey projects also contributed to theastronomical database, which accumulated huge amounts of various massive astronomicalimages and information.Modern computation techniques can automatically handle large amounts of data. However, thetechnique of automatic image recognition, compared with the power of human eyes, is still in itsinfant stage. For example, there are still no satisfactory computing programs that canautomatically identify and classify the various types of galaxies in astronomical images, andtherefore, numerous galaxies in the astronomical images of the astronomical database have neverbeen carefully inspected and sorted out. Many of these sources might contain importantknowledge and information waiting to be discovered and developed. This is the most likely areawhere the public can participate and contribute to astronomical research.My students and I have been developing some image recognition programs to find mergedgalaxies and other types of galaxies. In 2009, we discovered ~15,000 new pairs of merginggalaxies within 400 degree square of the sky using our preliminary pattern recognitionalgorithms at that time. This is still the largest catalog of merging galaxies based on consistentsearching criteria in the world. Over the past few years, we have kept developing our algorithmand have improved its power by about ten times. Although our algorithms are the most efficientgalaxy image recognition routines in the world, the human eyes are still the most powerful toolin recognizing and identifying galaxies. The galaxy candidates we found through our algorithmsstill need to be confirmed by the naked eye. But it is an impossible task for any research team tovisually identify the hundreds of thousands to millions, tens of millions galaxy candidates.The purpose of this project is to establish a website for the public to participate the identificationof new galaxies online. W will use our image recognition program to select possible new galaxyimages for the public to visually inspect and classify online. Any public person can test andjudge the first-hand scientific information by herself/himself. People can also learn astronomicalknowledge and participate in astronomical research through this process. We will also store theresults of the public identification as a database for future use in research. The main purpose ofthis project is for the public to understand the operation of science and the judgments ofscientific data through the actual participation in the inspection and classification of astronomicalimages.
StatusFinished
Effective start/end date1/08/1731/07/18

UN Sustainable Development Goals

In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. This project contributes towards the following SDG(s):

  • SDG 11 - Sustainable Cities and Communities
  • SDG 16 - Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
  • SDG 17 - Partnerships for the Goals

Keywords

  • astronomy
  • galaxy
  • scientific outreach
  • image recognition

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