Wanted: Citizen Scientists to Hunt 'Space Warp' Galaxies

Astronomers are calling for volunteers to help them search for "space warps," rare and distant galaxies that bend light around them like enormous lenses.

Citizen scientists participating in the Space Warps project, which launches Wednesday (May 8), could help shed light on the mysterious dark matter pervading the universe and aid research into a number of other cosmic phenomena, organizers said.

"Not only do space warps act like lenses, magnifying the distant galaxies behind them, but we can also use the light they distort to weigh them, helping us to figure out how much dark matter they contain and how it’s distributed," Phil Marshall, a physicist at Oxford University in England and one of Space Warps' leaders, said in a statement. [Gallery: Dark Matter Throughout the Universe]

"Gravitational lenses help us to answer all kinds of questions about galaxies, including how many very-low-mass stars, such as brown dwarfs — which aren’t bright enough to detect directly in many observations — are lurking in distant galaxies," Marshall added.

The Space Warps project asks armchair astronomers to spot gravitational lenses in hundreds of thousands of deep-sky images. The human brain is more adept than computers at picking out patterns, and amateurs can do it about as well as professional astronomers can, organizers said.

Participants don't have to spend hours peering at their computers to make a meaningful contribution, Space Warps leaders said.

"Even if individual visitors only spend a few minutes glancing over 40 or so images each, that’s really helpful to our research — we only need a handful of people to spot something in an image for us to say that it’s worth investigating," Oxford's Aprajita Verma, another of Space Warps' principal investigators, said in a statement.

Space Warps is affiliated with the Zooniverse, a broad citizen-science website that helps connect the public with projects in a wide range of fields. The Zooniverse began in July 2007 with the launch of Galaxy Zoo, which asks participants to classify galaxies according to their shape.

"The Zooniverse has always been about connecting people with the biggest questions, and now, with Space Warps, we're taking our first trip to the early universe," team member Arfon Smith, director of citizen science at Chicago's Adler Planetarium, said in a statement. "We're excited to let participants and planetarium visitors be the first to see some of the rarest astronomical objects of all."

You can join the Space Warps project starting on Wednesday by going to www.spacewarps.org. Visitors to the site will get a quick tutorial on what to look for, and then the hunt will be on.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebookor Google+. Originally published on SPACE.com.

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Mysterious Ultra-Red Galaxies May Be Cosmic 'Missing Link' (SPACE.com)

Scientists have spied a new type of ultra-red galaxy lurking at the far reaches of the universe, a new study reports.

Using NASA's Spitzer space telescope, the astronomers spotted four remarkably red galaxies nearly 13 billion light-years from Earth — meaning it's taken their light about 13 billion years to reach us. So researchers are seeing the galaxies as they were in the early days of the universe, which itself is about 13.7 billion years old.

NASA's Hubble space telescope has imaged even more ancient galaxies, but the four ruddy objects seen by Spitzer are a breed apart, researchers said.

"Hubble has shown us some of the first protogalaxies that formed, but nothing that looks like this," study co-author Giovanni Fazio, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said in a statement. "In a sense, these galaxies might be a 'missing link' in galactic evolution."

The four newfound galaxies shine much more brightly in infrared light than in visible wavelengths, which is how the infrared-sensitive Spitzer was able to detect them. The research team still isn't sure why they're so strikingly red.

There are three main reasons why a galaxy may appear red, researchers said. First, it may be extremely dusty. Second, it could contain many old, red stars. Or third, the galaxy may be extremely distant, in which case the expansion of the universe has stretched its light to very long (and very red) wavelengths.

All three of these factors may be in play in the newfound galaxies' case, researchers said. But they're not sure, since much about them remains mysterious.

"We've had to go to extremes to get the models to match our observations," said study lead author Jiasheng Huang, also of the CfA.

The four galaxies are grouped together and appear to be physically associated, rather than constituting a chance alignment of like objects, researchers said.

The team hopes to study the galaxies further, perhaps employing powerful ground-based instruments such as the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile. And they'd like to find more examples of this new type of galactic "species."

"There's evidence for others in other regions of the sky," Fazio said. "We'll analyze more Spitzer and Hubble observations to track them down."

The astronomers reported their results online in the Astrophysical Journal.

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Warped Galaxies Reveal Signs of Universe's Hidden Dark Matter (SPACE.com)

Warped visions of distant galaxy clusters are offering a reflection of the invisible matter inside them that astronomers are using to map the unseen side of the universe.

Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have observed the first of a number of galaxy clusters that they hope to use to build a cosmic census of hidden dark matter. Dark matter, thought to make up 98 percent of all matter in the universe, cannot be seen, only felt through its gravitational pull.

To find out where dark matter lies, and how much of it there is, scientists look for an effect called gravitational lensing. This bending of light is caused when mass — including dark matter — warps space-time, causing light to travel a crooked path through it. The end effect is a curvy, funhouse-mirror type view of distant cosmic objects.

The observed lensing is always stronger than it should be based on the visible matter alone. By compensating for this effect, researchers can deduce what component is caused by the presence of dark matter. [Spectacular Hubble Photos]

Scientists are planning to observe a total of 25 galaxy clusters under a project called CLASH (Cluster Lensing and Supernova survey with Hubble).

One of the first objects observed for the new census is the galaxy cluster MACS J1206.2-0847. This conglomeration of galaxies is one of the most massive structures in the universe, and its gigantic gravitational pull causes stunning gravitational lensing.

In addition to curving of light, gravitational lensing often produces double images of the same galaxy. In the new observation of cluster MACS J1206.2-0847, astronomers counted 47 multiple images of 12 newly identified galaxies.

By conducting the survey, astronomers are attempting not just to weigh these distant behemoths, but to learn more about when and how they formed. Theory suggests that the first galaxy clusters came together between 9 billion and 12 billion years ago.

Some previous research suggests that dark matter is packed more densely inside galaxy clusters than previously thought. If the new study can confirm that, it may mean that the universe's galaxy clusters formed earlier than most scientists assume.

You can follow SPACE.com senior writer Clara Moskowitz on Twitter @ClaraMoskowitz. Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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