Gravity Spy

The Gravity Spy project enlists citizen scientists to help physicists and astronomers working on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO). With a system as incredibly sensitive as LIGO, sources of noise in the system can interfere with the search for gravitational-wave signals that come from merging black holes or other astrophysical systems. Interestingly, though, one of the best ways to look for noise, and differentiate between different sources of noise, is still the human eye. Therefore, in this project, we ask for help from citizen scientists, who will have the opportunity to learn to characterize and classify potentially new sources of noise in the LIGO system; working in concert with machine-learning algorithms to amplify the work of the citizen scientists, this project helps scientists narrow their focus to gravitational wave sources and develop citizen science methods that can scale with upcoming data-intensive scientific endeavors.