In the News – Ringed Galaxies from GZ Mobile

Dear volunteers,

Thanks to you, we’ve found 40,000 new ringed galaxies – about six times more than all the ringed galaxies anyone has ever found before! The Royal Astronomical Society were impressed enough to share the news in a press release here.

I launched the Rings Challenge here on this blog ten months ago, asking for your help searching for galaxies with rings around them. I wasn’t sure if anyone would be interested in using the new mobile project we made. Ten months later, you’ve made a million swipes on 100,000 galaxies. I’m so grateful.

Rings are rare. To help you find them, I created an automatic assistant. I used the first half of your swipes to teach an artificial intelligence algorithm what rings look like. Then I set the algorithm searching a million DESI galaxies to find more rings. Finally, I took the galaxies the AI thought might have rings and asked you to check them with the second half of your swipes. This two step approach let us both search many galaxies quickly and have human eyes vet all of our discoveries.

This is the first major science result from the new GZ Mobile project. Making an app wasn’t part of the original plan – the first iPhone launched three weeks after GZ, 15 years ago this month – but it’s now a crucial tool for hunting specific galaxies quickly. I hope you’ll join us for the next search.

Cheers,

Mike

P.S

You can find more technical details on the machine learning on my personal blog.

P.P.S

Apologies to ChristineM, who many months ago correctly point out that I should technically call them “ringed” galaxies rather than “ring” galaxies.