WOW: A million classifications!!
After just two weeks, we have surpassed an incredible 1 million classifications on the new ESA Euclid data! Many congratulations to all of the Space community on reaching this milestone! We have been blown away by your amazing contributions – a huge thank you to each and every one of you! In this blog post, Phil Holloway shares some of his favourites from the fantastic systems the Space Warps community has found so far.
First up is a double-source plane lens (ID: 119647449), where two different galaxies, at different distances from us, are lensed by the same foreground galaxy. Double-source plane systems are very rare because they require all three galaxies (the lens, and two sources) to be almost perfectly aligned. This system shows two rings around the central lens, and is reminiscent of the Jackpot lens in its almost circular nature. Such a clear double-source-plane lens will no doubt be studied for many years to come.
The second system is a face-on spiral lens (ID: 119679277). Most lens galaxies are elliptical and are typically made up of old stars. Occasionally, spiral galaxies can act as lenses, since they have the most massive and older stars in their central regions, though when they do they are usually seen edge-on since this maximises the amount of mass along our line-of-sight which makes lensing more likely. Face-on spiral lenses, such as shown below, are practically unheard of! This lens, alongside a beautiful spiral galaxy complete with bright blue star-forming clumps, is a really fantastic find.
Finally, we have an edge-on lens surrounded by a near-complete Einstein ring (ID: 119674016). There are two darker lines extending horizontally along the length of the lens – this is dust within the lens galaxy, which acts to absorb some of the background light. The light of the source galaxy is relatively white/yellow, which indicates it could be made up of older stars, have dust that turns blue light red or be very distant (further analysis is needed to identify which it is), unlike many lensed sources which appear blue because of their young stellar population.
These amazing finds are just a small fraction of the lenses you’ve discovered so far and we can’t wait to see what else you’ll find. Thanks again for all your amazing classifications, happy classifying and we’ll see you on Talk!
Space Warps helps to find 497 spectacular lenses in Euclid data
by Phil Holloway
Thanks to your incredible efforts, we are delighted to have found 497 strong lens candidates in Euclid Q1 data. Over the course of the project we had more than 800,000 classifications from over 1000 wonderful volunteers, and the results are a testament to your hard work. As part of the lens search, we developed the Strong Lens Discovery Engine, a pipeline to search for lenses in Euclid data, of which Space Warps was an integral part.
We found a whole range of lens candidates – a collage of our favourites is below, with a whole range of lens configurations. We also found 4 double-source-plane lenses! These are incredibly rare systems where the lensing galaxy deflects light from two different background galaxies, forming double rings/arcs.
We have temporarily removed these images while the Euclid Refine project is live
Credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, M. Walmsley, T. Li, N. Lines, and Euclid SL SWG
We have temporarily removed these images while the Euclid Refine project is live
Credit: Euclid Collaboration: Walmsley et al (2025)
As part of the Strong Lens Discovery Engine we used multiple machine learning algorithms (including ‘Zoobot’ trained using zooniverse classifications in Galaxy Zoo) to do an initial sift of the data which the Space Warps volunteers inspected to find the most likely lens candidates. This machine + volunteer partnership will be crucial with the much larger data releases coming soon from the Euclid survey. We also used Euclid’s incredible resolution to produce precise models of all the lens candidates and will continue to analyse these fascinating lenses for many months and years to come!
You can read the full results in the 5 science papers released today:
B: Lens search around massive galaxies,
C: Finding lenses with machine learning,
D: Double-source-plane lenses,
E: Lens classification combining machine learning and Space Warps.
Thank you again for your incredible hard work in finding these amazing lenses – we couldn’t have done it without you! Keep an eye out for future Space Warps projects – this initial data release was only 0.4% of the sky area of the full survey, so there will be many many more exciting lenses to find soon!
Stay tuned!
Phil and the Space Warps Team
Phil Holloway is a final year PhD student in the Department of Physics at Oxford and has done amazing work through his time with us including on Space Warps! We’re so thankful to Phil and to you all for making these results possible. Phil, Anu & Aprajita (Space Warps co-leads).
Space Warps 