Solar Jet Hunter: A citizen science initiative to identify and characterize coronal jets at 304 Å

¹ European Space Agency, European Space Research and Technology Centre, Keplerlaan 1, 2201 AZ Noordwijk, The Netherlands
e-mail: musset.sophie@gmail.com
² Leiden Observatory, Leiden University, PO Box 9513 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands
³ School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Minnesota, 116 Church St. SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA
⁴ Minnesota Institute for Astrophysics, University of Minnesota, 116 Church St. SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA
⁵ New Jersey Institute of Technology, University Heights, Newark, NJ 07102-1982, USA
⁶ Institut für Sonnenphysik (KIS), Freiburg 79104, Germany
⁷ Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory, 3251 Hanover Street Building 252, Palo Alto, CA 94304, USA
⁸ Bay Area Environmental Research Institute, NASA Research Park, Moffett Field, CA 94035, USA
⁹ The Catholic University of America, 620 Michigan Avenue, Washington, DC 20064, USA

Received: 26 September 2023
Accepted: 23 April 2024

Abstract

Context. Solar coronal jets seen in extreme ultraviolet (EUV) are ubiquitous on the Sun, and they have been found in and at the edges of active regions, at the boundaries of coronal holes, and in the quiet Sun. Jets have various shapes, sizes, brightness, velocities, and durations in time, which complicates their detection by automated algorithms. So far, solar jets reported in the Heliophysics Event Knowledgebase (HEK) have been mostly reported by humans looking for them in the data, with different levels of precision regarding their timing and positions.

Aims. We created a catalog of solar jets observed in EUV at 304 Å containing precise and consistent information on the jet timing, position, and extent.

Methods. We designed a citizen science project, Solar Jet Hunter, on the Zooniverse platform, to analyze EUV observations at 304 Å from the Solar Dynamic Observatory/Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (SDO/AIA). We created movie strips for regions of the Sun in which jets have been reported in HEK and ask the volunteers to 1) confirm the presence of at least one jet in the data and 2) report the timing, position, and extent of the jet.

Results. We report here the design of the project and the results obtained after the analysis of data from 2011 to 2016. We note that 365 “coronal jet” events from HEK served as input for the citizen science project, equivalent to more than 120 000 images distributed into 9689 “movie strips”. Classification by the citizen scientists resulted in 883 individual jets being identified.

Conclusions. We demonstrate how citizen science can enhance the analysis of solar data with the example of Solar Jet Hunter. The catalog of jets thusly created is publicly available and will enable statistical studies of jets and related phenomena. This catalog will also be used as a training set for machines to learn to recognize jets in further datasets.