DOI: 10.65398/QDJO5713
Our teams (e.g., CEERS, COSMOS-Web, NGDEEP) and research group have been involved in a number of JWST-related outreach activities. These include organizing campus exhibits and demos (for example, the annual ImagineRIT event held on the RIT campus), delivering public talks to a range of audiences (e.g., K-12, community events, affinity groups), participating in press releases and interviews related to new science results, and media interviews such as the two-part NOVA special. More specialized activities include citizen science activities, where members of the general public not only learn about astronomy, research, and datasets, but actually contribute to scientific measurements. Two such examples are Galaxy Zoo-JWST and Redshift Wrangler.
Galaxy Zoo – JWST
The Galaxy Zoo project has been ongoing for many years, first using Sloan Digital Sky Survey observations, then Hubble, and now JWST images. Citizen Scientists visually classify the morphologies of large numbers of galaxies and these measurements have made discoveries and been included in a number of publications. This work has now been extended to JWST NIRCam images, first using images from the CEERS Early Release Science field. The classifications have been completed and the first set of papers are in progress. Images from the other public fields will soon be incorporated into the project.
Redshift Wrangler
The “Redshift Wrangler” citizen science project to analyze extragalactic spectroscopic measurements was launched last summer with great success with ground-based spectroscopic observations in the COSMOS field. Astronomy is faced with ever-increasing dataset sizes. Currently, distant galaxy surveys contain spectra of tens to hundreds of thousands of galaxies, but these numbers will soon grow into the hundreds of millions as new instruments come online. Automated methods of analyzing spectra are in their early stages, prone to inaccuracies, and still require visual inspection of individual objects. Citizen science can help bridge the gap between the current method of individual PIs inspecting every spectrum and the eventual improvements to automated algorithms. In fact, citizen scientists may be the key to providing ample training sets needed for these improvements. The large spectroscopic datasets being obtained by JWST, particularly several large wide-field slit-less spectroscopy programs, will soon be incorporated into Redshift Wrangler. Volunteers undertake two main tasks: 1) to mark the positions of emission and absorption features in the spectra, which are then used to calculate the redshifts of the galaxies, and 2) to quality check the automated fitting of the emission lines that is used to measure emission line flux.