Half-a-million classifications!!

An amazing effort, thank you for your classifications! Here’s an update on your recent classifications from Phil Holloway.

A huge thank you to everyone who contributed to the latest ESA Euclid lens test search – over the this test project you’ve collectively made an impressive half-a-million classifications, and identified some amazing lens candidates. The science team are now carefully going through all of the high scoring candidates you identified (this blog post summarises how the classifications are combined to arrive at the high scoring candidates). We’re not as fast as you all, and we don’t always agree, so it will take some time to get to the final results but we will keep you posted here as the sample emerges. We’re very excited to see the systems you identified, and below is a preview of some of the amazing lens candidates that we particularly liked – we hope you do too!

Amongst the beautiful lens candidates you have found, there have been some edge-on spiral lenses (centre), group-scale lenses (centre-left), and galaxy-scale lenses with clear counter images (far left/far right). Seeing counter-images give us extra confidence that a system is a genuine strong lens system, while edge-on lenses can be used to test our theories of gravity and dark matter. 

As a reminder, these candidates come from a small amount of test data (about 50 deg² of the sky), we expect there will be few hundred high quality lens candidates in this area among your high scoring systems.

Euclid will eventually survey an area of around 14,000 deg², 280 times larger tan this test area, so there are lots more lenses to come!! 

Thanks again for all your contributions – Space Warps will return very soon so please watch this space!