Help us determine if the tracings of galaxy spiral arms are clustered correctly.
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Spiral Graph: Cluster Buster Statistics
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Help us determine if we've correctly selected all the individual arms of spiral galaxies traced by Spiral Graph volunteers. This will allow us to better measure how tightly wound the arm structure is and potentially find rare intermediate mass black holes!
Spiral Graph: Cluster BusterAbout Spiral Graph: Cluster Buster
Scientists can infer a lot about spiral galaxies by simply measuring the shapes of their arms. In Spiral Graph (a previous project on the Zooniverse platform also led by this research team) we enlisted the help of volunteers like you in marking the spiral arms on images of galaxies. More than 8,400 volunteers identified and traced the spiral arms on more than 20,000 galaxy images. We have now built an algorithm that clusters, or groups, these tracings together to indicate the individual spiral arms for a galaxy, but it is not always correct. We need your help to look at the results of the clustering and to tell us if the algorithm was successful or not so we can improve its accuracy.
The research team is affiliated with the Astronomy & Astrophysics Research Lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and the Department of Computing Sciences at Coastal Carolina University.
For more citizen science projects that NASA sponsors, go to science.nasa.gov/citizenscience.