FAQ
What are clumps?
Clumps are big, bright regions in galaxies where stars are being formed more quickly than usual. They can be anywhere from ten light-years across to over a thousand, and come in a wide range of shapes, colors and properties.
What's the goal of the Clump Scout II project?
Our overarching goal is to identify all the clumps in the millions of galaxy images from the Euclid Space Telescope. By correcting machine predictions on Clump Scout II, you will help us improve the machine algorithm we need to process that huge amount of data.
Why are they called "clumps"?
When mid-20th century scientists found a new type of galaxy with bright spots scattered around it, they didn't know quite what to make of them. Astronomers decided to call these galaxies "clumpy" in order to distinguish them from their smoother-looking counterparts. From there, the bright spots themselves became known as "clumps", and the name stuck.
Why are clumps worth studying?
Galaxies in the early universe used to be brimming with clumps, but today, there are very few. Their vanishing act raises many questions: Why did clumps form in the first place, and what happened to make them stop? By learning more about clumps, we're trying to understand how galaxies and the universe as a whole have changed over time.
We can also use clumps to test existing theories about how galaxies work. For example, some theories predict that galaxies are stable enough for clumps to live for billions of years; others predict that galaxies are less stable, and clumps are constantly being ripped apart and reformed. We can test both of these theories, and others like them, by finding real clumps to study.
What if I'm not sure if something marked by the machine is a clump?
You can read the Field Guide at any time which shows many examples of normal clumps and odd clumps that should be marked. The Field Guide is located in the set of buttons on the right side of the main image at the bottom. In addition, you could take a look at the Tutorial again and look at the Need Some Help? button on the main task section.
If you don't think that an object marked by the machine model is correct, you can delete the marking. Instructions on how to do this are available in the Tutorial.
After I submit my marks, what happens to them?
The first step is that marks are "aggregated". This means we take all of the marks made by all of the volunteers who classified the image and form a consensus shape. We rely on crowd agreement, areas of the image that many volunteers mark are designated as clumps, while those marked by only a few volunteers tend to be ignored.
Once we're certain that people's marks agree, we retire the image and it is no longer shown to users. The locations of its clumps become official scientific data.
If a computer can do this, why do you need humans to help?
Thanks to the volunteers who contributed to the first Galaxy Zoo: Clump Scout project, we now have a deep learning model that is fairly good at identifying clumps. However, as you will see while working on the project, our model is far from perfect. Identifying clumps may seem easy to us, but computers (even sophisticated deep learning models) have a lot more trouble. The reason for this is that clumps appear in images that are full of extraneous information. Computers have to sift through other galaxies in the background, bright stars in the foreground, and the complexities of the subject galaxy itself before they can isolate clumps from all these competing signals. For computers to get better, they need to to be corrected by humans when they get something wrong. That's where you and this project come in!
Human volunteers are also better at drawing attention to clumps that are interesting, unexpected, or just plain weird. Based on your feedback, which you can submit via the Talk boards, we can go back and examine these clumps in more detail. This is how citizen scientists in Galaxy Zoo project discovered Green Peas, an entirely new class of galaxy we weren't expecting.
What opportunities besides people-powered research exist that let people with an interest in science and space exploration get involved?
Check out this NASA website to learn about hackathons, challenges, competitions, and events open to the public.