Today we launch the Solar Jet Hunter project on Zooniverse! This project is a citizen science initiative: we ask the volunteers for their help. Indeed, solar physicists today have an enormous amount of data to go through, and some tasks cannot be automatized (yet). In this project, we ask the volunteers to spot and report solar jets, which are ejections of solar material seen in the solar atmosphere.
Why should we be interested in solar jets? These ejections are of interest for several research topics. Among them, the question of the origin of energetic particles, accelerated during solar flares in our Sun’s atmosphere, but are then detected in the whole solar system, including close to Earth. Those energetic particles can even impact our human activities on Earth and in space!
During the last decade, the Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO), a satellite hosting several solar telescopes, provided us with high-resolution images of the Sun every 12 seconds… That’s a huge volume of data! So far, automated algorithms have not managed to consistently catch solar jets in these images: most of the jets are reported by researchers looking through the images from SDO. But they lack time to report every single jet: jets are in fact quite common on the Sun! While algorithms are not great at detecting solar jets, humans, like you and me, are quite good at it: that’s because the human eye easily catches moving features in videos. By playing movies of what’s happening on the Sun, we can tell if something is moving up or outwards, and see the origin of this outburst. With just a little training to “know” what jets look like, everyone can participate in the jet hunt!
After a phase of beta test of the project, we are very happy to launch the Solar Jet Hunter project on Zooniverse. We designed two different “workflows”, in which the tasks asked from the volunteers are different. In the workflow “Jet or not”, volunteers will look at short videos of a region of the Sun, and tell if they see one (or several) jet(s), or no jet at all. That’s all!
In the second workflow, “Box the jets”, we ask the volunteers to look closely at the movies containing at least one jet (found with the answers to “Jet or not”). Since it will be fed with the data from the first workflow, in which volunteers found jets, this second workflow is not immediately available at the launch…
But as soon as we get a few hundreds of subjects from “Jet or not”, we will open the workflow “Box the jets”, in which the volunteers are asked to click on the base of the jet (their origin), at the time when the jet starts, and at the time when the jet is last visible. This information is precious: it indicates both the precise location of the origin of the jet, as well as the precise time when it starts and when it becomes invisible. Additionally, the volunteers draw a box around the jet: this gives an idea of the extent of the jet (its length and width, and its direction).
All of these pieces of information will be gathered and formatted in a jet catalog that will be available online: many solar physicists are interested in jets and would benefit for this database, which will be the first jet database to provide precise data on the jet timing, location and extent, for the whole duration of the SDO mission (June 2010 to today!).
Today, we launch the project with data gathered with the 304 A filter during the year 2011. The results of this first data set will be used to fine-tune the algorithms gathering the volunteers’ answers, and help us prepare for the release of the next data sets. Stay tuned to hear about these first results and the release of new data sets in the Zooniverse project!