Astronomy is entering a new regime of “big data.” The volumes of information being collected are staggering, and future projects promise data sets of ever-increasing size. The total data volume of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey’s Data Release 14 tops out at over 156 terabytes (TB). By 2018, the Dark Energy Survey, which takes up to 2.5 TB of data per night, will have mapped 5,000 degrees of the Southern Hemisphere sky, including 300 million galaxies, to ultimately produce about one petabyte (1,000 TB) of data. When the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope begins full science operations in 2022, its 3,200-megapixel camera will be able to collect 15 to 30 TB of data every night.
With such huge volumes of data comes the need for an increased ability to handle them. That’s where citizen science comes in, filling a unique role to propel science forward.
Zooniverse is a self-proclaimed platform for people-powered research. This unique website connects citizen scientists — you — with professional researchers, to promote collaboration and discovery using vast catalogs of data.
It’s not just astronomy and physics that have benefited from this amazing platform. Zooniverse’s diverse project categories include biology, history, climate science, the arts, medicine, ecology, and the social sciences. If you grow tired of studying transit data from the Kepler space telescope (Exoplanet Explorers: exoplanetexplorers.org) or characterizing glitches in the LIGO instruments to improve gravitational wave detection (Gravity Spy: gravityspy.org), you can easily switch to counting Weddell seals in Antarctica’s Ross Sea (Weddell Seal Count: www.zooniverse.org/projects/slg0808/weddell-seal-count). Or perhaps sorting through fragments of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean texts dating from the 10th to 13th centuries is more your style (Scribes of the Cairo Geniza: www.zooniverse.org/projects/judaicadh/scribes-of-the-cairo-geniza).
Regardless of the projects you choose to explore, you’ll be taking part in scientific research alongside some 1.6 million volunteers around the world. “Zooniverse is inclusive. It’s about discoveries we can make together,” says Chris Lintott, Zooniverse’s founder and principal investigator, and professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford.
