Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Engage! Astronomers need your assistance to detect space warps
http://cosmiclog.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/05/07/18111177-engage-astronomers-need-your-assistance-to-detect-space-warps
Engage! Astronomers need your assistance to detect space warps
By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News
May 7, 2013
Think you can find space warps? Astronomers have recruited thousands of citizen scientists to look for exoplanets, galaxies, moon craters and other cosmic curiosities — and now they need your help to go after one of the weirdest phenomena in space-time: gravitational lenses.
The Space Warps website gives Internet users the opportunity to sift through telescope images and spot galaxies so massive they bend the light rays that pass near them, like a lens. The venture could help crack some of the secrets of dark matter, the mysterious cosmic stuff that is more plentiful than the ordinary matter we see around us.
"Not only do space warps act like lenses, magnifying the distant galaxies behind them, but we can also use the light they distort to weigh them, helping us to figure out how much dark matter they contain and how it’s distributed," Oxford University physicist Phil Marshall, one of the leaders of the Space Warps research team, said in Wednesday's kickoff announcement. "Gravitational lenses help us to answer all kinds of questions about galaxies, including how many very low-mass stars such as brown dwarfs — which aren’t bright enough to detect directly in many observations — are lurking in distant galaxies."
Space Warps is the latest gem in Zooniverse's constellation of online citizen-science ventures — a constellation that also includes Planet Hunters, Galaxy Zoo, Moon Zoo and much, much more. The warp-hunting effort follows the model set by those other projects: Participants are given online training exercises to sharpen their lens-spotting skills, and then they're set loose to check sky survey images from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope.
<snip>
Engage! Astronomers need your assistance to detect space warps
By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News
May 7, 2013
Think you can find space warps? Astronomers have recruited thousands of citizen scientists to look for exoplanets, galaxies, moon craters and other cosmic curiosities — and now they need your help to go after one of the weirdest phenomena in space-time: gravitational lenses.
The Space Warps website gives Internet users the opportunity to sift through telescope images and spot galaxies so massive they bend the light rays that pass near them, like a lens. The venture could help crack some of the secrets of dark matter, the mysterious cosmic stuff that is more plentiful than the ordinary matter we see around us.
"Not only do space warps act like lenses, magnifying the distant galaxies behind them, but we can also use the light they distort to weigh them, helping us to figure out how much dark matter they contain and how it’s distributed," Oxford University physicist Phil Marshall, one of the leaders of the Space Warps research team, said in Wednesday's kickoff announcement. "Gravitational lenses help us to answer all kinds of questions about galaxies, including how many very low-mass stars such as brown dwarfs — which aren’t bright enough to detect directly in many observations — are lurking in distant galaxies."
Space Warps is the latest gem in Zooniverse's constellation of online citizen-science ventures — a constellation that also includes Planet Hunters, Galaxy Zoo, Moon Zoo and much, much more. The warp-hunting effort follows the model set by those other projects: Participants are given online training exercises to sharpen their lens-spotting skills, and then they're set loose to check sky survey images from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope.
<snip>
1 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
