Try out drawing on these streams with the Experiment platform - click here and select the Stellar Streams workflow. Experiment is external to Zooniverse. See this blog post for details.
Also, this project recently migrated onto Zooniverse’s new architecture. For details, see here.
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Stellar Stream Identification Statistics
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By the numbers
Message from the researcher
Hi! I’m Nathaniel Starkman, a postdoctoral astrophysicist at MIT. I research the detection, characterization, and modelling of stellar streams as a tool to map the dark matter shaping our universe.
nstarkmanAbout Stellar Stream Identification
It's a murder mystery and the culprit could be dark matter. Help us catch the suspect by finding the crime scenes!
Star clusters orbiting around distant galaxies can be killed by gravity and if a cluster dies in the right way the scene of the crime is called a stellar stream. The crime scene holds clues to solving the cluster's death. Since dark matter is responsible for most of the gravity in a galaxy, we have our suspect. Now to find the scenes of the crimes...
That's where you come in. The universe is a big place. Help us find the stellar streams so we can catch the dark matter before it strikes again!
This is an identification task for finding stellar streams. Positive identifications feed into an annotation task for characterizing the stellar stream. Based on those annotations we can map the gravity — from the galaxy and the dark matter — in the system. Find enough streams and these maps will lead us to answers about the nature of dark matter.
⋆ Images are taken from the Euclid Q1 data release. Find out more about this incredible space mission in the FAQ! ⋆