Space Warps - ESA Euclid

Space Warps helps to find 497 spectacular lenses in Euclid data

Thanks to your incredible efforts, we are delighted to have found 497 strong lens candidates in Euclid Q1 data. Over the course of the project we had more than 800,000 classifications from over 1000 wonderful volunteers, and the results are a testament to your hard work. As part of the lens search, we developed the Strong Lens Discovery Engine, a pipeline to search for lenses in Euclid data, of which Space Warps was an integral part.

As part of the Strong Lens Discovery Engine we used multiple machine learning algorithms (including ‘Zoobot’ trained using zooniverse classifications in Galaxy Zoo) to do an initial sift of the data which the Space Warps volunteers inspected to find the most likely lens candidates. This machine + volunteer partnership will be crucial with the much larger data releases coming soon from the Euclid survey. We also used Euclid’s incredible resolution to produce precise models of all the lens candidates and will continue to analyse these fascinating lenses for many months and years to come!

You can read the full results in the 5 science papers released today:

A: Search overview,

B: Lens search around massive galaxies,

C: Finding lenses with machine learning,

D: Double-source-plane lenses,

E: Lens classification combining machine learning and Space Warps.

Thank you again for your incredible hard work in finding these amazing lenses – we couldn’t have done it without you! Keep an eye out for future Space Warps projects – this initial data release was only 0.4% of the sky area of the full survey, so there will be many many more exciting lenses to find soon!

Stay tuned!

Phil Holloway and the Space Warps & Euclid Strong Lensing Team