Citizen scientists and artificial intelligence have come together to discover a staggering 430,000 galaxies scattered across the universe. The massive haul includes 30,000 ring galaxies, which are considered to be the rarest of all possible galaxy shapes.
Subaru is an 8.2-meter, optical-infrared telescope located near the summit of the extinct volcano Maunakea on the island of Hawaii. Thiscollects a ton of incredible data — so much so that astronomers struggle to sift through it all to spot and classify the shapes of new galaxies. That is where the 10,000came in, but even this vast army of volunteers needed a little assistance. Hence, they turned to AI for a helping hand.
"Although AI classification takes less than one hour even for 700,000 galaxies, this work cannot be done without the data collected by GALAXY CRUISE over the past two years," team leader and Waseda University researcher Rhythm Shimakawa"We would like to thank all the citizen astronomers who participated in the project. I hope to see more collaborative outcomes in the future.".
Some of the spiral galaxies discovered by citizen scientists and AI cruising through Subaru telescope data.The team determined that ring galaxies display characteristics that make them intermediates between spiral galaxies and what are known as elliptical galaxies, which have a less defined structure.