If you can teach computers to learn, NASA needs your help.

Cosmologists hope gamers, programmers, computer scientists and geeks-of-all-trades can help them identify evidence of dark matter. An international group of astronomers are hosting a competition, called GREAT10 (for GRavitational lEnsing Accuracy Testing), to come up with better ways to analyze distorted images of galaxies – the signatures of invisible dark matter lurking in the universe.

Massive clumps of matter can act as a giant cosmic magnifying glass, distorting space-time in their immediate vicinity. Light traveling through the matter clump is warped and distorted, a phenomenon called gravitational lensing.

Sometimes the distortions are obvious, like in the Hubble image of a distant galaxy cluster above. But sometimes they're too subtle to be picked out by human eyes, and can even be confused with noise from the telescope used to take the galaxies' picture.

So cosmologists have turned to machine learning algorithms that teach computers to recognize patterns.

"We're trying to teach computers to pick out the correct shape given all sorts of other noise around the galaxy's shape," said NASA cosmologist Jason Rhodes, who is helping to organize the challenge. "We have our ideas as a community about how to do this, but we realized a few years ago that it was quite possible there were ideas we weren't familiar with."

The competition is designed to bring fresh ideas from machine learning and computer science experts. But the challenge is open to anyone.

"The image manipulation software and techniques used in gaming and some digital cameras are very similar," said astrophysicist Thomas Kitching of the University of Edinburgh, which is helping to sponsor the event. "Anyone with experience in image manipulation and software development would be in a good position to enter the competition."

Rhodes compares GREAT to other citizen science and engineering challenges, like the X-Prize private spaceflight competitions or the Netflix Prize to improve the movie rental website's recommendation algorithms. Those challenges promised million-dollar prizes, which is beyond the cosmology community's budget. But the GREAT10 winner will probably get an iPad or a Mac laptop.

And the real grand prize is helping to solve one of the trickiest and most fundamental puzzles in astronomy: What is the universe made of?

Ultimately, the computer programs developed for the GREAT challenge will be used to help unmask dark matter and dark energy, the mysterious stuff that makes up 95 percent of the universe.

By studying slightly distorted galaxies, scientists can make detailed maps of dark matter, the stubbornly invisible stuff that makes up 24 percent of the universe and makes itself known through gravitational tugs on regular visible matter. Knowing where the dark matter is and how it changes over time will help astronomers decipher dark energy, an even more mysterious substance that makes up 72 percent of the universe.

"The most exciting thing about this is that we are taking an interdisciplinary approach to one of the most pressing problems in all of science," Rhodes said. "The ultimate goal here is really to develop methods for studying the composition of the universe and the ultimate fate of the universe. People who haven’t spent their lives studying cosmology can make a real contribution via the GREAT10 challenge."

Image: Light bends around the massive galaxy cluster Abell 2218 in this image from the Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: Andrew Fruchter (STScI) et al., WFPC2, HST, NASA

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