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Abstract Title: Power of the people: Using citizen science to power big data astronomy
Abstract: "The Hobby-Eberly Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) will find over one million galaxies that are 9 billion to 11 billion light-years away, and will yield the largest map of the universe ever produced. Over the past year, I have used Zooniverse, the worlds largest citizen science platform, to train participants all over the world to efficiently classify these galaxies. The map will allow us to measure how fast the universe was expanding at different times in its history. Changes in the expansion rate will reveal the role of dark energy at different epochs, but the most difficult task is determining which galaxies come from our epoch of interest (at z~2-3) and which ones are nearby. These one million sources require visual classification for the most accurate results, an amount not feasible to handle from within the collaboration. The project, Dark Energy Explorers, has been live for 3 months and we have already had over 1.5 million classifications. I will discuss the methods we have used and how citizen science can be applied to big data astronomy and how we have preliminarily applied machine learning."
Abstract Type: Contributed Poster Presentation
Session Time: Poster Session 1 Room B
Poster Number: 1B-10

Author/Organizer Information

Primary Contact: Lindsay House
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX 78751
Phone: 8285459275
Co-Author(s)
and Co-Presenter(s)
Karl Gebhardt, University of Texas at Austin
Keely Finkelstein, University of Texas at Austin