Black Hole Hunting with NASA

December 28, 2012 By IdeaConnection

crowdsource science/black hole huntingNASA is giving space lovers a new opportunity to help it expand its knowledge of the Universe.

The space agency has launched a new citizen science game on the Zooniverse website. It’s called Clouds and allows players to identify space clouds and black holes from their computer, tablet or smartphone screens.

Crowdsourced Science

Scientists need your help to better understand outer space and how it is put together. In this new game, players are presented with an image and they have to decide whether it’s a “glowing cloud, a hole in the sky or something in between.”

The photos were taken using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and the Herschel Space Observatory.

To help players come to a conclusion there are a number reference images of black holes and glowing clouds.

Understanding Our Galaxy

Clouds is part of the Milky Way Project, an initiative that aims to sort and measure our galaxy by studying and filtering through data from a number of sources.

The ultimate goal of the Clouds projects is to identify dense, cold cores of gas and dust that collapse under their own gravity before giving birth to new stars. They are known as infrared dark clouds.

Ready for Blastoff!

If you want to play the game and help astronomers, click on the crowdsourced science project here. There is a short tutorial to familiarise you with how it is played.

“We’re really excited to launch Clouds and see results back from our giant volunteer team of amateur scientists,” said Robert Simpson, principal investigator of the Milky Way Project and a postdoctoral researcher in astronomy at Oxford University.

“We think the community can blast through all these data fairly quickly. We may even be done by the spring and that would be an amazing result for citizen science.”


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