More beautiful Euclid strong lenses

A couple of months ago, we uploaded 60,000 systems as part of a small test area from new Euclid data. Here’s a further update from Phil Holloway.

We wanted to share some of the exciting strong lens candidates that we have found so far in the last search in a small test area of Euclid data. Thanks to the incredible half-a-million classifications you made, we’ve identified over 500 high-probability strong lens candidates. A selection of our favourites are below. As you can see, there are a wide variety of configurations and galaxy types, including edge-on spiral galaxies and some redder lensed systems which may be more distant or dustier than usual.

Beyond these beauty of these new lens systems, we have used this set of lenses to help us understand the performance of the machine learning finders and see how they compare to each other. This is very important for any forthcoming larger searches with new Euclid data – we want to maximise the number of lenses we find, while minimising how many non-lenses we need to sift through to find them. The results of the test search will allow us focus your valuable time on the images that contain the most likely strong lens candidates.

Thanks again to everyone who has contributed so far – each and all of your classifications are greatly valued. We’ll soon be launching a search and we can’t wait to get started. Watch this space!!