Tuesday

Gravity Spy is a community-science project aiming to classify transient noise (glitches) in gravitational-wave observatory data. Volunteers on the Zooniverse platform can classify glitches into a set of predefined classes. As gravitational-wave detectors change between observing runs, new classes of glitch can arise. This talk will highlight how volunteers discovered a new type of glitch in data from Advanced LIGO's third observing run. The new class (named Crown by the volunteers and Fast Scattering within LIGO) was independently identified by detector-characterization experts and our volunteers, enabling us to validate the accuracy of the volunteers' investigations. Gravity Spy may serve as an example of how citizen-science volunteers can go beyond classification tasks to identify novel patterns and features within data sets if given appropriate support.