The Fluffiest Frontier

There is a mysterious group of galaxies up there, hiding in darkness. They are faint,
small (for galactic standards of course), and battered by spending eons being
robbed of their gas and stars. And yet, they can teach us the secrets of dark matter
and of galaxy evolution.

These ancient, gentle wisp of matter are generally called Low Surface Brightness
galaxies (LSB). In recent years we have observed a growing number of them around
our very own Milky Way, and in nearby clusters. They are starting to be so
numerous, in fact, that it is high time for scientists to turn to citizen science for
answers.

Help us unravel the secrets of the fluffiest objects in the universe!

The Fornax Cluster

The galaxies you will classify in this project are living their quietly eventful lives in
the Fornax cluster, and they are found mostly towards its center. A few have also
been observed in the outskirts, allowing us to compare their physical properties
and come up with models to explain the differences.

Fornax itself is the second closest cluster to our system, and it appears in the
southern sky, almost entirely in the Fornax constellation.

The images used in this project come from the Fornax Deep Survey, which looks at
the whole system with deep multi-band imaging through the eyes of the VLT
telescope in Chile.

Studying the galaxies residing in this cluster allows us to have some better
measurement of their distances, because the galaxies are constrained by the its
position. Moreover, it shines light on a singular environment, peculiar for its low
mass and for presenting a rare examples of a merger of a galaxy subgroup with the
main galaxy group.

All in all, a good place to start!

Surviving the Galactic Crowd

These obects have not led a peaceful life. For most of their life, they have been
bullied by their bigger and meaner neighbors: ram-pressure stripping, harassment,
and the influence of the gravitational potential well of the cluster are the main
culprits for their shy and tired appearance. This life of hardship has however made
them very wise! If they could tell us all that has happened to them, we would finally
be able to answer some big questions about galaxy evolution. Moreover, since
where there is a galaxy there is dark matter, knowing more about their positions
and number can help us to add some pieces to the puzzle that is the dark universe.

What are we asking you to do?

The main objective of our workflow is to let you help us count and classify Low
Surface Brightness objects in the Fornax cluster. To do so, we ask you questions
about visual cues that scientists can use to box the galaxies in different
categories, depending on their research needs. We also need your help to identify
those pesky objects and artifacts that our algorithms can't differentiate from
galaxies. Knowing what these objects look like will allow us to better our model and
will also give a powerful contribution to science. So what does the workflow look
like?

A short look into the classification itself

Trick question! There are three workflows. The format is similar but the content
changes. In all of them, you will be guided through a series of questions about the
object in the very center of the image you will be shown. If you have any doubt on
how to answer a question, you can click on 'NEED HELP WITH THIS TASK' to see a
handy and practical task-specific tutorial. The field guide on the right of the screen
will be there during the whole classification if you have any question about a
specific concept.

CLASSIFY ON THE GO!

Short and sweet, this app-friendly workflow will only ask you one question: is there
a galaxy in the image? This will be a powerful tool for scientist to clean up the data
set, and a short and fun task for you!

CLASSIFY!

Here things start getting more complicated: we want to know about what the image
is about, so we add a question for the galaxies, and a question for the 'not a galaxy'
interlopers. So, do you actually see a galaxy? Or is it a group of far away objects that
gets classified as a single clump of matter? This is the most common culprit of
misclassification from the algorithms. Or maybe it is something else altogether. In
that case it might be just a trick of the light of a nearby star, or nothing at all, or
something completely different. We want to exclude those cases first of all.
Knowing what the problem is allows us to make our algorithms better, so don't be
disappointed if you get a lot of those! You are still giving a big contribution to
science by 'taking them out'.

CLASSIFY! HARDCORE VERSION

If you dare, click here to see the most challenging workflow of the three, where we
want to know about color, shape, and personality of the galaxies. Are you up for the
task?

Let's go through the classification process together:

If you selected 'galaxy' from the first simple questions, you get a softball: what color
is it? Galaxies are always divided in 'blue' and 'red' because those color properties
highly correlate with their age, and therefore basically all the other physical
properties. Of course, you will not see a clown-nose red nor a sea blue in our
pictures. Some galaxies will however appear warmer, with tones on the
yellow/orange side, and others will appear colder, with white and blue tones. Then
again, sometimes it is impossible to tell: too faint! Too fuzzy!

Some fluffy galaxies, for example, are nucleated: this means that some stellar
activity still survives in a bright needle-like bright core in the very center of it. If you
see something like that, click on 'yes a bright point'. If the center is bright but not
pointy, it might be something in the middle or maybe a bright background object:
tricky to know just by looking at it, but give your best guess!

Now a few questions about the galaxy's personality: what is its shape? And its
consistency? Are there any features, or clumps, or something else that makes it
look special somehow? Take a good look and answer these questions as well as you
can.

DISCUSS AWAY!

There we go! the classification is over. If you found something peculiar you would
like to discuss, you can talk about it by clicking clicking on 'talk' or by publishing a
post in one of the project's threads. For any further comments or questions, don't
hesitate to contact any of the team members.

Goals

With this project, we want to answer many different questions. Some of these
questions are meant to deepen our understanding of Fornax, faint galaxies, dark
matter, etc. Other questions will allow us to build stronger algorithms to find and
classify these objects. Finally, we want to understand if Zooniverse (and citizen
science in general) is the right tool for this field and for our group.
A positive
answer would mean a long-term investment in this project, with more datasets
added in the future. We are very optimistic so far!

If you want to know more about our research goals, you can visit the 'results'
section.

Thank you!!

We are incredibly thankful for the help you will give on this project: we are very
aware that you choose to do this in your free time, and therefore want to give back
somehow. This is the very first of what will hopefully be a series of projects with the
aim to explore the secrets of the Fluffy Universe, so we want to learn how to make
the most out of this for our volunteers! We will keep you updated on the science
you will contribute to, and, for the most passionate, we will provide materials and
tutorial on this fascinating new frontier of astrophysical research. We appreciate
all of your help and input, so don't hesitate to contact us (see the 'TEAM' page)!

Stick around & stay fluffy~