Where astrophysics meets citizen science: RGZ-EMU

Posted on February 16, 2023Comments Off on Where astrophysics meets citizen science: RGZ-EMU

As co-leader of the upcoming citizen science project Radio Galaxy Zoo EMU, I could not be prouder for the awesome team that is bringing this together! Our purpose is to use the help of citizen scientists in order to discover the unexpected! And to identify and characterise sources in the radio sky!

On February 27, 2023, I am attending the international conference Coordinated Surveys of the Southern Sky at Munich and presenting our citizen science project, and early (pre-launch) science results!

Stay tuned on the zooniverse.org platform for the upcoming public launch of our project!

Below you can download the poster we are presenting. In short we are asking citizen scientists to:

  1. identify host galaxies for radio sources and match their radio components together
  2. classify radio sources based on simple descriptions
Example of identification and matching: green circle marks the host galaxy, shown in the background image; blue box includes the radio components on the foreground (contours) that compose the source

Why? With these data we can train automatic algorithms and scan our radio observations in order to identify and classify tens of millions of radio sources! We can then understand the role these objects play in how galaxies grow and evolve.

Sparkler poster presentation about RGZ-EMU at the CSSS 2023 meeting
Comments Off on Where astrophysics meets citizen science: RGZ-EMU