A citizen science exploration of the X-ray transient sky using the EXTraS science gateway

TL;DR

This paper details the use of the EXTraS science gateway to engage citizen scientists, including students, in analyzing X-ray data archives to discover and characterize transient sources, exemplified by a new flaring source in NGC 6540.

Contribution

It introduces a citizen science framework utilizing the EXTraS science gateway for analyzing archival X-ray data, fostering public participation in astrophysical discoveries.

Findings

Discovery of a flaring X-ray source in NGC 6540

Successful engagement of students in data analysis tasks

Creation of a vast catalog of X-ray source behaviors

Abstract

Modern soft X-ray observatories can yield unique insights into time domain astrophysics, and a huge amount of information is stored - and largely unexploited - in data archives. Like a treasure-hunt, the EXTraS project harvested the hitherto unexplored temporal domain information buried in the serendipitous data collected by the European Photon Imaging Camera instrument onboard the XMM- Newton satellite in 20 years of observations. The result is a vast catalogue, describing the temporal behaviour of hundreds of thousands of X-ray sources. But the catalogue is just a starting point because it has to be, in its turn, further analysed. During the project an education activity has been defined and run in several workshops for high school students in Italy, Germany and UK. The final goal is to engage the students, and in perspective citizen scientists, to go through the whole validation process: they look into the data and try to discover new sources, or to characterize already known sources. This paper describes how the EXTraS science gateway is used to accomplish these tasks and highlights the first discovery, a flaring X-ray source in the globular cluster NGC 6540.