By Alessandro Sonnenfeld, Aprajita Verma & Anupreeta More for the SW-HSC team

We did it!

Thousands of you, making millions of classifications, have succeeded at classifying 300,000 images of galaxies in only five months after the launch of the SW-HSC campaign! Well done – what an amazing effort!

We’re currently reviewing the lens candidates with the highest scores, and we’re impressed with the quantity and the variety of lenses that have been discovered.

One of the best candidates is subject ‘20986142‘, with the unmistakable four image ‘quad’ configuration of a lensed compact source, possibly a faint quasar. This is also one of the most distant lens galaxies in our sample (we are seeing its light at about half the age of the observable Universe), a useful feature for the study of how galaxies evolve in time.

Another impressive lens is subject ‘21000104‘, consisting of two massive galaxies close to each other which, thanks to their combined lensing power, produce a set of multiple images with large angular separation. All of the citizens who inspected this candidate classified it as a lens, making it one of the few systems with a perfect score, and rightly so!

Three new SW-HSC promising lens candidates found in the latest SW search. The same image is shown in the top and bottom rows, but with lensing galaxy subtracted in the bottom row.

There are also nearly a dozen disk galaxies identified as lenses, like system ‘21067892‘. Not many disk lenses were previously known, making these new discoveries very useful for the study of this particular class of objects, including their masses.

We are working on refining the final SW-HSC sample and will post-back with more details soon. Based on our early inspection, we certainly expect that you have discovered more than a hundred new strong lenses!

Thank you so much for your classifications! This success would be impossible without each and every one of you.  We look forward to sharing all the new lensed candidates that you have discovered soon — watch this space…