Space Warps is a Zooniverse project, launched in Spring 2013, that crowd-sources the discovery of gravitational lenses. For news about the project, check out our project blog. These pages here are mostly quiet, except for the sounds of scientists, tinkering.
Results and Analysis
You can follow along on github as we analyze the classification data, and write up the results as research papers.
Gravitational Lens Modeling
We have built a little lens simulator, called "LensToy," to show people very quickly what gravitational lenses do - you place a source "behind" a massive galaxy in the image shown to you, and LensToy shows you what the corresponding lensed features would look like. Go on, have a play!
We are also experimenting with online modeling tools. One of our team, Rafi Kueng (University of Zurich), built the "SpaghettiLens" interface to the GLASS modeling code, and tested it in Space Warps Talk with a small group of volunteers. You can read his paper here.
Another code being explored is the all-javascript LensWrangler, which uses the same lensing library as LensToy, but adds an additional lens model manipulation layer. See what you think.
If you are interested in helping develop LensToy or LensWrangler further, please get in touch!