Astronomy needs you! How you can be part of astronomy's big data revolution

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The Open University, Faculty of STEM

Join us for a Q&A and panel discussion and work with our OU academics on the Black Hole Hunters Zooniverse project.

As part of The Open University's events for British Science Week, we bring you this online Q&A and panel discussion and Zooniverse project. Follow us on <a href="https://twitter.com/OU_STEM" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Twitter</a> and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/TheOpenUniversitySTEM" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Facebook</a> for updates on all of our #BSW22 events.OU academics Stephen Serjeant, Professor of Astronomy, Dr Hugh Dickinson, Lecturer in Astronomy, with OU research student Adam McMaster and Research Fellow Dr Beatriz Mingo will be holding a Q&A and panel discussion on the connection between the coming “big data” era in astronomy and the increasing importance of citizen science projects for training machine learning models. This will include a Zooniverse classification activity, where we will encourage the audience to join us in working on one of our current projects, <a href="https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/hughdickinson/superwasp-black-hole-hunters" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Black Hole Hunters</a>. We suggest you take a look at the project online to familiarise yourself with it ahead of the event. We will demo the project at the start of the event, and then begin the panel discussion and be open to questions. Our panel Professor Stephen Serjeant is a professor of astronomy at the Open University, where he works on finding warps in space and time, known as gravitational lensing. Everything warps the space around it, and when you have a foreground galaxy and a background galaxy almost perfectly lined up, you see the background one through the warp surrounding the foreground one. These alignments are pretty rare, but by scanning the sky in infrared wavelengths, you find places where a background galaxy has been magnified brighter by the warping. These warps are one of the few ways to trace where dark matter is located. He also has a team working on using machine learning to find these warps with future space telescopes. Stephen is also interested in how galaxies evolve, and in getting the general public directly involved in scientific discovery through citizen science. He is also a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and a Chartered Physicist.Dr Hugh Dickinson is a lecturer in astronomy at the Open University and works on all sorts of topics related to astrophysics. He started off searching for elusive Very High Energy (VHE) gamma-ray emission from X-ray binaries and later, investigated the VHE emission from active galaxies with jets that point straight towards us, which we call Blazars. Nowadays, he researches how star formation in galaxies proceeded at different stages in the history of the Universe.Hugh works at the intersection between astrophysics, citizen science and machine learning. He helped to develop and run several successful citizen science projects, including Galaxy Zoo: Clump Scout and SuperWASP: Black Hole Hunters. These projects allow citizen scientists to rapidly carry out complex analyses on thousands of items of data, but that won’t be enough to handle datasets containing billions of items that we expect in the near future. To deal with these Big Data, Hugh helps to develop new machine learning algorithms that can do similar analyses much, much faster. Adam McMaster is a PhD student searching for black holes and variable stars, using data from the SuperWASP survey, with help from citizen scientists on the Zooniverse platform. He is interested in studying time-domain astronomy – in other words, the kinds of things that change quickly enough that we can see them happen rather than having to wait millions of years!Before starting his PhD Adam was part of the team that runs the Zooniverse, helping to create the Zooniverse’s project building platfo<a href="https://www.superwasp.org/vespa/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer"></a>rm. More recently he has created a new website, called <a href="https://www.superwasp.org/vespa/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">VeSPA</a> , to publish the results of the SuperWASP Variable Stars project in a way that is accessible to the volunteers to helped create them. Dr Beatriz Mingo is a postdoctoral researcher at the Open University, where she uses data mainly from radio and X-ray telescopes to study the jets (extremely fast streams of particles) launched by supermassive black holes. Studying their interactions with their host galaxies and the galaxy groups and clusters they live in is crucial to help us understand the evolution of our Universe. Beatriz is originally from Spain, where she completed my BSc and MSc and carried out an undergraduate traineeship at the European Space Agency, before moving to the UK in 2009. She completed my PhD at the University of Hertfordshire in 2013, and subsequently worked at the University of Leicester, before joining the OU in 2017. Beatriz has only recently become a radio astronomer, having worked mostly with X-ray satellite data in the past, and she is still involved in the planning and development of future X-ray telescopes.

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Astronomy needs you! How you can be part of astronomy's big data revolution

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