Abstract

We present analysis of using a citizen science campaign to improve the cosmological measures from the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX). The goal of HETDEX is to measure the Hubble expansion rate, Hz and angular diameter distance, DA at z = 2.4 each to percent level accuracy. This accuracy is determined primarily from the total number of sources using Lyman-alpha emitters (LAEs), the false positive rate due to noise, and the contamination due to [OII] emitting galaxies. This paper presents a citizen science project, Dark Energy Explorers, with the goal of increasing the number of LAEs, decreasing the false positive due to noise and decreasing the [OII] contamination. This initial analysis has shown that citizen science is an efficient and effective tool for classification most accurately done by the human eye. During the first year, since launch in late February 2021, we have reached 3.5 million classifications by 8,000 volunteers in over 80 countries. By incorporating the results of the Dark Energy Explorers we expect to improve the accuracy on the cosmological parameters by 10 − 30%. While our primary goal is to improve on HETDEX, Dark Energy Explorers has already proven to be a uniquely powerful tool for science advancement and increasing accessibility to science worldwide.