Wanted: Rubin Difference Detectives
Published 22 December 2025
Background image: Rubin Obs/NSF/AURA
The Rubin Alert Pipeline is expected to generate ten million alerts each night. Now, the project needs sharp-eyed humans to help improve the identification of astrophysical transients, variables, and moving objects.
The Rubin Alert Production team has built a Deep Convolutional Neural Network to go through the millions of detections and reject the bogus ones – now this machine learning classifier is in need of human eyes to further fine tune it.
Rubin Difference Detectives is a real research project from Zooniverse in which citizen scientists can classify images as real or bogus. More than 1,300 volunteers have signed up so far but more are needed!
Sign up now
Visit Rubin Difference Detectives on the Zooniverse website
Background image: Rubin Obs/NSF/AURA