TCD goes global with ‘citizen science’ project to shed further light on sunspots and solar storms

Scientists at Trinity College Dublin (TCD) are hoping to throw further light on sunspots and solar storms as they go global with a ‘citizen science’ project following phenomenal success in Ireland.

The Irish public shone with the first phase of the project, producing over 300,000 mouse clicks from over 1,600 volunteers since the sunspotter.org website was launched in Ireland in February. Each of the 13,000 images released was classified more than 50 times in a single month, outstripping all expectations.

Now, the researchers are going global, releasing more than 250,000 sunspot images for people to work through. They will be asked to rate the relative complexity of each sunspot image they see on the Sunspotter website, based on its size, shape and arrangement of ‘magnetic blobs’.