Abstract

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) regularly publishes catalogs of quasars and other astronomical objects. Until the most recent catalog, which added 150,000 quasars that have never been seen before, spectra from quasars have been visually inspected by one or two members of the SDSS quasar working group. Quasars that show Broad Absorption Line (BAL) properties are indicative of outflowing gas from the quasar which are of great interest to researchers. Due to the number of quasars in the catalog, the BAL information in the new DR14 catalog was recorded entirely computationally and currently lacks flags for confirmed BAL quasars. These flags are helpful for researchers to easily select the quasars with BAL properties and study their outflows as well as objects between them and Earth such as invisible gas clouds and intervening galaxies. This project uses the Zooniverse citizen science platform to visually inspect quasar spectra for BAL properties to check the accuracy of the current pipeline code as well as properties of ionized gas from the quasar’s accretion disk and find candidates for in-falling gas into the quasar central engine. Through this platform a number of quasars with BAL properties have already been detected as wrongly identified by the automated code as having no balnicity. The layout and format of a Zooniverse project provides an easier way to inspect and record data on each spectrum output and share the workload via crowdsourcing. Work done by the quasar group members will serve as a beta test for a public project upon the official release of the DR14 quasar catalog by SDSS.

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