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’.

Lead scientist Dr Paul Higgins said that when it comes to sunspots, a human, even with only very basic training, is often superior to computer programs.

“The reason we cannot just use computers to classify all of this data is that ‘complexity’ is not easily quantifiable. Humans can easily compare two objects, like a skateboard and a lorry and decide, ‘this one is more complex’, but this is beyond current computer software.

“However, the data we collect from Sunspotter volunteers may allow us to train a computer algorithm to measure sunspot complexity in the near future,” said Mr Higgins, who is a solar flare expert and research fellow at TCD’s Astrophysics Research Group, but is based in Palo Alto, California.

Sunspotter has been designed so that anyone, from kids to grandparents, can help the team improve forecasts of solar eruptions.

Though solar eruptions produce the beautiful Aurora Borealis, they also disrupt GPS, damage satellites and endanger astronauts.