Finished! Looks like this project is out of data at the moment!
Welcome! This project recently migrated onto Zooniverse’s new architecture. For details, see here.
Results
On Future Discoveries
We hope to continue discovering new dwarf galaxies with your help, and we look forward to sharing our latest findings here and in the talk channels!
We are committed to recognizing the contributions of the volunteers who help make these discoveries possible. Below, you will find a list of all candidate discoveries made through this platform, along with links to the corresponding scientific papers and a full list of volunteers who helped classify each object. Zooniverse volunteers will also be acknowledged in our published papers, and a link to the Zooniverse Best Candidates talk channel will be included in the acknowledgements section.
In addition, we will personally reach out to volunteers who demonstrate exceptional effort or insight and invite them to be more involved in the discovery and writing process. However, this will be determined on a case-by-case basis, based on the level and nature of each volunteer’s contribution. Regardless, all contributors will be acknowledged either here or in the acknowledgements and references of relevant publications.
We expect to have more candidates for you all to classify in the summer of 2026, so stay tuned!
Current Zooniverse In-Progress Candidates
Thanks to all of your hard work over the last few months, we have completed our first batch of subjects. We are very appreciative of the effort you all put in, as the pace of classifications was much faster than we anticipated! With over 1.15 million classifications from over 1500 volunteers, we have now retired all 46,277 candidates. We are excited to share how we are using your classifications!
Looking through all of your candidates has been a pleasure, and we are currently analyzing the most highly ranked subjects, which we present below.
It was very interesting to see how you all classified our various categories of subjects: the known real galaxies, the simulated galaxies, and the actual survey subjects. In the image available below, there is a histogram of the yes/no ratios for the various subject sets. As you can see, people classify the real and simulated galaxies very well. We also did expect a distribution of junk to potential galaxies similar to what we see in the graph. This means that we expect to be able to find many new dwarf galaxies from your candidates!
As for the candidates that we are following up, we have been running more time-intensive follow up algorithms including one, called UGALI, which has a more complicated model in confirming is something is a real dwarf galaxy or not. If candidates have passed both the Zooniverse and UGALI runs, we have or will soon submit follow up observation proposals to possibly confirm the dwarf with deeper imaging and/or spectroscopy. We will continue to perform more analyses and submit telescope proposals to follow up on the most promising subjects. The current list of candidates, and links to discussion channels about them is below. Keep in mind that this is not an exhaustive list, as we are continuing to look through your candidates. For now, since these are not confirmed as real systems, we plan to recognize the volunteers who voted on these candidates in the talk channels for each.
The candidates are viewable in the talk channels set up below:
https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/ywyh/delve-dwarf-galaxy-quest-milky-way-neighbors/talk/7207
These candidates will require us to get time at various telescopes across the world. Collecting and analyzing data from these follow up observations will take some time. We will let you know the progress of this as we go, especially if your votes have contributed to a new discovery!
Pre-Zooniverse DELVE Discoveries
Over the past few years, the DELVE collaboration has found many new dwarf galaxies. Featured below are some of the most recent discoveries.
Carina IV, Phoenix III, DELVE 7
Ultra-Faint Milky Way Satellites Discovered in Carina, Phoenix, and Telescopium with DELVE Data Release 3 (Tan et al.)
Aquarius III
Discovery and Spectroscopic Confirmation of Aquarius III: A Low-Mass Milky Way Satellite Galaxy (Cerny et al. 2025)
Virgo II, Bootes V, Leo Minor I, DELVE 3,4,5
Six More Ultra-Faint Milky Way Companions Discovered in the DECam Local Volume Exploration Survey (Cerny et al. 2023)
