LIGO is designed to detect gravitational waves which produces a length change of 10E-18 metres in its 4 km long arm. This also makes it sensitive to a great deal of instrumental and environmental sources of noise. Among these the one that are of most concern are transient, poorly modeled artifacts known by the LIGO community as glitches. Gravity Spy is a program designed to involve citizen scientists in identifying those glitches, which are not ofastrophysical origin. These identified glitches makes a dataset that is used to train a machine learning algorithm to enhance its ability to separate the noise from the gravitational wave signals.
This program was initially launched as a beta version on June of 2016. The full implementation of the program was launched on October of 2016. It has close to 12,000 registered users and has achieved about 3,000,000 different classifications by now. You can signup at the following link and help LIGO find glitches that are already known or even find a new kind of glitch.
You can also get new updates about the gravity spy by following the blog linked below:
Enjoy and happy glitch hunting!
(Prepared by Sudarshan Karki, Graduate Research Assistant at University of Oregon)
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