Calling all imugrian space nerds...

If you're a big space nerd like me, then you've probably heard of a citizen science platform called Zooniverse. Well, for my computational astronomy course I've created project on Zooniverse where volunteers can look at the spectra of quasars to see if there are any changes over time.

Well OP, what are quasars and why should I care?

Quasars are a type of Active-Galactic-Nuclei (AGN). They're super-massive black holes at the center of distant galaxies. What makes them unique is that the black holes are so powerful that the energy created by gas falling into the black hole emits enough light that they look like a star in optical images and emit radio waves from their poles. In fact, the term quasar comes from 'quasi-stellar radio source'. When they were first observed, astronomers thought that they were stars since they showed up as points of light in images. But, their spectra showed that they were very different.

What's a spectra?

A spectrum is a range of the wavelengths of the light emitted by the quasar. This tells us what the quasars accretion disk is made up of and what it's emitting.

What exactly are you studying, OP? And, why do you want me to help?

I'm studying the output of quasars over a period of time. Quasars often throw out clouds of gas from their accretion disks. These will show up as Broad Absorption Lines (BALs) in the spectra, you can see in this screen grab from my project. We can figure out how fast these BALs are moving based on their redshift and position from their emission peaks to tell us how powerful these quasars really are. It also tells us what the accretion disk is made up of and how those elements increase or decrease. The purpose of this particular project is figure out approximately what fraction of quasars are throwing out these gas clouds and how often. I would also like to test how accurate untrained people can be with detecting these changes for a possible future project.

I need your help because: 1) it's a CITIZEN science project. So I need strangers to classify these images and 2) There's 1200 image sets to go through so I need a dozen (or more) people to spend time classifying to get through all of them.
 
If you're interested, you can either DM me or comment your Zooniverse user name below and I will add you as a tester to the project so that you can get started. If you want to help but you don't have a Zooniverse account, don't worry. Zooniverse is free so all you need is an email and you can join easily. You will be credited (or not if you choose so) in my final presentation.

Happy hunting! Now back to your regularly scheduled shitposting.