During five years of observations, the Hobby-Eberly Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) will find over one million galaxies that are 9 billion to 11 billion light-years away, yielding the largest map of the universe ever produced. The map will allow HETDEX astronomers to measure how fast the universe was expanding at different times in its history. Changes in the expansion rate will reveal the role of dark energy at different epochs. Various explanations for dark energy predict different changes in the expansion rate, so by providing exact measurements of the expansion, the HETDEX map will eliminate some of the competing ideas.
The most difficult task is determining which galaxies come from our epoch of interest (10-11 billion years ago at z~2-3) and which ones are nearby. We need your help to identify the signals that are from distant galaxies.
We need your help to identify false or bad detections from our telescope. By doing this you will be helping identify the real galaxies from the fake ones which will allow us to conduct the dark energy science. We can then use those classifications as a pure training set for machine learning! Head on over to the Results page to learn more about how we are using these results!