A new citizen science project invites the public to scan never-before-seen images from the Euclid Space Telescope in search of galaxies bending spacetime.
Led by the European Space Agency (ESA), the initiative, called Space Warps, uses data from Euclid to crowdsource the search for rare cosmic distortions known as gravitational lenses. These occur when massive foreground objects such as galaxies or galaxy clusters warp spacetime, bending and magnifying the light from more distant background objects. As Euclid continues its survey, sending around 100 GB of data to Earth each day, citizen scientists are being asked to help identify strong gravitational lenses in the dataset, according to a statement from the space agency.
