Space Warps Launches: Public Invited to Hunt for Cosmic Mirages in Euclid Data
The European Space Agency (ESA) has launched Space Warps, a new citizen science project on the Zooniverse platform, calling on the public to identify strong gravitational lenses in images from the Euclid space telescope. The project aims to uncover over 10,000 new lens candidates from the telescope’s first year of routine observations.
Project Details
Launched on March 24, 2025, Space Warps asks volunteers to examine roughly 300,000 images that have been pre-selected by artificial intelligence algorithms. These images come from what will become Euclid Data Release 1 (DR1), a dataset containing information on approximately 72 million galaxies—roughly 30 times larger than Euclid’s initial search dataset.
Scientists expect this project to identify more than 10,000 new strong gravitational lens candidates, a number that would surpass the total count of gravitational lenses discovered since the first was found nearly 50 years ago.
Scientific Context
Gravitational lensing occurs when massive objects—such as galaxies or galaxy clusters—warp spacetime, bending and distorting light from more distant objects behind them. These strong lenses can produce multiple images, stretched arcs, or complete rings known as Einstein rings.
By studying these lenses, scientists can measure the distribution of dark matter in galaxies and clusters, trace the expansion history of the universe, and study the influence of dark energy.
Euclid Mission Background
Euclid launched in July 2023 and began routine science observations on February 14, 2024. The mission has a six-year plan to observe billions of galaxies up to 10 billion light-years away. In a preliminary analysis of the first 0.04% of Euclid data (Quick Data Release Q1), researchers identified 500 galaxy-galaxy strong lenses, most of which were previously unknown.
"We've already seen the success of combining AI with visual inspection by citizen volunteers and scientists on Space Warps, efficiently finding hundreds of high-probability lens candidates in an initial small Euclid search in 2024."
— Aprajita Verma, Space Warps co-founder and project lead, University of Oxford
Verma added: "In this brand new DR1 data, 30 times larger than the initial search and together with our improved AI algorithms, we are expecting to find more than 10,000 high quality lens candidates."
Euclid is a European mission built and operated by ESA with contributions from NASA. The Euclid Consortium includes more than 2,000 scientists from 300 institutes across Europe, the United States, Canada, and Japan. Thales Alenia Space is the prime contractor for the satellite and service module; Airbus Defence and Space developed the payload module including the telescope. NASA provided detectors for the Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer (NISP).
German Contributions
Researchers from Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) in Munich and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Garching refined the data selection procedure, adding 27,000 additional candidates from Q1 data, which yielded 72 extra strong-lensing objects (14% of the sample).
German institutions participating in Euclid include:
- Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (Heidelberg)
- Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (Garching)
- LMU Munich
- University of Bonn
- Ruhr University Bochum
- University of Bielefeld
- German Space Agency at DLR (Bonn)
The German Space Agency provides 60 million euros in funding from the National Space Programme, and Germany contributes approximately 21% to the ESA science programme.
Public Participation
No specialized knowledge in telescope operation or physics is required to participate. Volunteers can access the Space Warps project directly via the Zooniverse platform and begin helping scientists discover new cosmic phenomena.