Euclid asks public to find lenses
- The European Space Agency and the Euclid Consortium launched a new Space Warps campaign on April 21, asking the public to inspect Euclid images for strong lenses. - Volunteers will review about 300,000 artificial-intelligence-selected images from 72 million galaxies, with Zooniverse saying the survey area could reveal more than 10,000 lenses. - The push follows a 2025 Euclid lens catalog that found 497 systems in 63 square degrees. (arxiv.org)
Gravity can bend light, turning a foreground galaxy into a natural magnifying glass that stretches a more distant galaxy into arcs or rings. The European Space Agency is now asking the public to help spot those distortions in fresh Euclid telescope images. (esa.int) The project is called Space Warps, and it relaunched on Zooniverse on April 21, 2026 with previously unseen Euclid data. Volunteers are being asked to classify candidate images of strong gravitational lenses. (zooniverse.org) (esa.int) Euclid is surveying the sky in high resolution, and the mission says it sends about 100 gigabytes of data back to Earth each day. That scale is why researchers are combining machine learning, citizen scientists and expert checks instead of relying on one method alone. (esa.int) For this campaign, artificial-intelligence systems first ranked 72 million galaxies in the upcoming Euclid Data Release 1. The public will then inspect about 300,000 of the highest-scoring images for missed arcs, rings and multiple-image systems. (zooniverse.org) (esa.int) Those warped systems matter because the amount and shape of the bending trace mass, including dark matter that cannot be seen directly. Euclid and ESA say bigger lens samples can also help test how the universe has expanded, which ties the project to dark energy research. (esa.int) The campaign is built on an earlier Euclid lens search that already showed the method works. A March 2025 Euclid paper reported 497 galaxy-galaxy strong lenses in 63 square degrees, including 250 top-grade candidates and 243 that had not been published before. (arxiv.org) That first catalog covered just 0.45% of Euclid’s survey area, according to the paper. The authors estimated that applying the same approach to Data Release 1 could produce about 7,000 high-confidence lens candidates by late 2026. (arxiv.org) Zooniverse puts the public-facing target even higher for the new campaign. Its project page says the 1,900-square-degree Data Release 1 area could reveal more than 10,000 new lenses, more than four times the number found in nearly five decades since strong lenses were first identified. (zooniverse.org) The data volunteers are seeing now are an early preview of Euclid’s first major public release, which Zooniverse says is due in autumn 2026. A Euclid mission page hosted by Caltech lists the formal Data Release 1 date as October 21, 2026 and says it covers more than 1,900 square degrees observed from February 14, 2024 through May 21, 2025. (zooniverse.org) (euclid.caltech.edu) For volunteers, the task is simple: look at galaxy images and flag shapes that look bent, doubled or ring-like. For astronomers, each click is another pass through a data flood that is too large for software or experts to finish alone. (zooniverse.org) (esa.int)
