Geoff and Sandy's Portal
The Zooniverse main site is here.
The Zooniverse is a huge project involving the public to help analyse data, photographs, transcribe historical documents - and lots more. Some of these sub-projects will be described to give you an idea of the wide scope of the requirements and how you can be involved in helping researchers make sense of the masses of data being acquired from around our world as well as from space. Training, which often requires little or no prior knowledge of the subject, is given.
There is the possibility that great discoveries could be made by you - such as the discovery of possible Earth-impacting asteroids or the existence of a huge planet in the far outer reaches of our Solar System.
One of the first citizen scientific endeavours was active about two decades ago when many thousands of enthusiasts allowed their computers to be used to search for radio signals from alien civilizations in deep space.
Samples of radio noise captured by the Arecibo and the Very Large Array radio telescopes, incidental to their scheduled studies, were automatically uploaded into personal computers worldwide and then analysed automatically in the background when the computers were otherwise idle. The software was searching for signals that might be buried in the noise.
This programme was organized by the SETI Institute where SETI stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
Any suspicious signals that might have been alien transmissions were sent automatically back to the SETI Institute for further analysis.
This is another view of the Very Large Array with me standing in the foreground to show the size of the dishes.
Millions of hours were spent by otherwise idle home computers, searching for alien signals. I left my computer running day and night for thirty months.
I found nothing of interest!
The modern equivalent to the SETI search is the Zooniverse. However, the Zooniverse covers a very much wider range of topics under these main headings:
Arts, Biology, Climate, History, Language, Literature, Medicine, Nature, Physics, Social Sciences and Space.
Below are the topics currently (March 2025) active. To find out more about individual topics click here.
MY FIRST TOPIC - SEEKING PLANET 9
Please click here to join.
I'm going to describe my involvement in three astronomy projects to encourage you to join in helping the experts in their research. The first is the search for a possible large planet - provisionally called 'Planet 9' - way out beyond Neptune.
This animation shows the orbits of some dwarf planets far outside the orbit of Neptune, (reference). The observation that these dwarf planets congregate on the left-hand-side of this diagram has suggested the existence of a large, as yet undiscovered, planet in the approximate orbit indicated. This planet's orbital period could be in the region of 5,000 years and it could currently be at a distance of approximately 400 to 800 astronomical units (AU) from the Earth, where 1 AU is the distance of the Earth from the Sun. It would be about four times the mass of Earth and have an apparent magnitude of about 21 which is close to the limit of sensitive celestial surveys such as the Catalina Sky Survey (reference).
However, the planet could be much more visible in the infra-red part of the spectrum because it could be generating heat internally as Jupiter does. The WISE space telescope, with its infra-red capability was well suited to this type of search.
The Planet 9 Zooniverse Project (reference) presents the viewer with four images taken on different dates with the WISE space telescope – WISE stands for Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, (reference).
The background is noise in the camera which makes it very difficult for a computer to pick out a small spot of light moving between the images. However, the human eyes and brain are very adept to spotting movement in noisy environments. It’s an evolutionary trait which was very valuable when our distant ancestors were being stalked by predators. In complex environments, spotting small movements could make the difference between living and being eaten.
This is similar to the method used by Clyde Tombaugh when he discovered the minor planet Pluto in 1930. These two photographic plates were exposed six days apart. Clyde was able to spot the very faint image of Pluto because it moved between the two images as shown by the arrows. (reference)
Following the discovery of this new member of our solar system, an international competition was started to find an appropriate name.
The winner of this competition was an eleven-year-old British girl named Venetia Burney. Her suggested name "Pluto" was adopted. (reference)
If I discover Planet 9 as my part of this Zooniverse Project will I be allowed to name this new large planet?
Imagine my shock when I discovered this track of an object on some of the photographic images! I immediately started to think of names for this new planet!
Alas, my dream of international fame evaporated when I was informed that this was asteroid number 252 named Clementina which had been discovered in 1886.
Although this sub-project was set up to search for Planet 9 it is also discovering minor planets (asteroids) and comets. WISE is credited with discovering 3,088 minor planets. There are currently (March 2025) over 85,000 Citizen Scientists searching WISE images for Planet 9 and other objects moving in our skies.
MY SECOND TOPIC - DISCOVERING NEAR EARTH OBJECTS (NEOs)
Please click here to join.
My second topic is the search for Near Earth Objects (NEOs). This involves searching images taken by the Catalina telescope for objects moving between exposures on different days. This is similar to the Planet 9 search described above but the images are presented in a different way. Four images of the same part of the sky are analysed by computer searches and possible moving objects are identified by moving green circles. I have to decide whether these computer identifications are likely to be real objects or artifacts in the equipment. ​
These four sequential images shows the computer making an incorrect identification. It has mistaken the diffraction spike from a bright star beyond the bottom of the image as four separate images of a moving object. This is where the human is superior to the machine. It is an obvious mistake to a human.
The large majority of computer identifications are false interpretations of artifacts or blemishes in the images. However, a real moving object is easily identity by the combination of human brain and eyes.
These three sequential images shows the computer making a correct identification. This faint object was marked by me as a real moving object. The project feedback reported that this object was indeed real but had already been discovered in 2012 and recorded as asteroid 376385.
MY THIRD TOPIC - SEEKING EINSTEIN RINGS
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When a galaxy is hidden behind a much nearer galaxy its light may still reach Earth because the beam of light can deflected by the nearby galaxy's gravitational field. This is explained in the above graphic (reference). This effect was predicted by Einstein and many examples of this deflection have been discovered. Project Euclid displays images of nearby galaxies and citizen scientists - like me - decide whether there is evidence of an Einstein Ring. Usually, only a partial ring is seen as in the images below.
In these four images of a galaxy, the light from a much more distant galaxy can be seen being refracted by the gravitational field of the closer galaxy and forming a partial Einstein Ring.
In this project, images of galaxies are displayed in four wavelengths of light and the Citizen Scientist marks the set of images as either showing or not showing refracted light coming around the foreground galaxy. In the example above I marked the images as showing a partial Einstein Ring.
In the example above I marked the set of images as showing an Einstein Ring. However, it was a simulated set of images inserted into the archive of images to test the reliability of the citizen scientists!
Einstein Rings are proving very valuable in cosmology because they allow astronomers to see the light of galaxies, so distant (and therefore in the very young universe) which could not be observed otherwise.
SUMMARY
I have describe three Zooniverse projects but there are about eighty projects in total covering the huge selection illustrated above. There must be something in that comprehensive list that would give you the opportunity to make a useful contribution. Dr. Becky Smethurst has enthusiastically described how Citizen Scientists working on the Galaxy Zoo project provided data essential to her team's research on early galaxy evolution - click here to see her YouTube video.
Maybe it will be you who makes an important discovery - such as discovering the asteroid that could destroy humanity. If you do, enjoy your fame whilst you can!