Finding stellar bow shocks by means of citizen science

D. TORRES; C. S. PERI; G. DE LA PENNA; A. KANNER

Bamberg

Congreso; Stars on the run; 2016

Citizen Science is the participation of no scientist volunteers in scienticprojects by means of collection, analysis and dissemination of scientic data.This practice has been spread into the 21st century by the use of informationand communication technologies. Several areas has been explored: fromagriculture to urban planning, from public health to oceanography, fromsocial sciences to software and services, and to space engineering. Stellar bowshocks produced by runaway stars seem to posses their highest luminosity onthe infrared band, and are easily detected in that range of the spectrum byvisual inspection. Both releases of the Extensive stellar BOw Shock Surveycatalogue (E-BOSS) were generated by these means, using mainly Wide-eld Infrared Survey Explorer images, with its four bands. It is an enormousamount of work, and the inspection can be developed by anyone. We area multidisciplinary group of researchers from astronomical and computerscience elds, developing 'Runaway stars', a citizen science project aimedto nd stellar bow shock among infrared images. This project is part ofthe Cientopolis platform which combines citizen science, a social networkand gamication. 'Runaway stars' includes gamication elements in order toprovide an extra motivation through the classication of the infrared images.