Blobs and Blurs: A Citizen Science-Identified Catalog of Diffuse Galaxies in the Fornax Cluster
Nicolas Mazziotti, Michael G. Jones, Donghyeon J. Khim, David J. Sand, Paul Bennet

TL;DR
This paper presents a citizen science-based catalog of 643 diffuse galaxies in the Fornax cluster, demonstrating high completeness and discovering new candidates beyond automated methods, highlighting citizen science's value in large-scale galaxy surveys.
Contribution
First crowd-sourced catalog of diffuse galaxies in a galaxy cluster, showcasing high completeness and discovery of previously undetected candidates.
Findings
Catalog contains 643 diffuse galaxies with 21.8% nucleated
Over 80% of objects recovered compared to existing catalogs
Detected 97 new candidates not found by automated searches
Abstract
We present a catalog of 643 diffuse galaxies identified through a citizen science search of the Fornax cluster, of which we estimate 21.8% are nucleated (139/637; 6 inconclusive). This marks the first crowd-sourced effort to construct a cluster-scale census of diffuse galaxies. These objects were visually identified using a combination of the Fornax Deep Survey and Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey imaging across 26 deg. Over 1,400 volunteers cataloged the candidates within this sky area at a rate of 1.15 days/deg. Our catalog is highly complete relative to existing dwarf catalogs of Fornax ( of objects recovered) down to an effective radius , the minimum size we suggested volunteers classify, and to an effective r-band surface brightness as faint as mag arcsec. We detect 97 candidates that…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsGalaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena · Astronomy and Astrophysical Research · Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae
