Everyone can become a 'detective' to find the sunspots reported in thousands of ancient drawings, thus helping scientists to reconstruct the variability of our star over the centuries to better predict what the future may hold for us.
It is the new citizen science project 'Sunspot Detectives' that kicks off on the zooniverse.org platform, promoted by the Max Planck Institute for research on the Solar System in Germany and by the National Institute of Astrophysics in Italy.
Anyone who wants to try their hand can take the time to examine the drawings resulting from the daily observations of the Sun carried out by the Jesuit scientist Angelo Secchi and his collaborators between 1853 and 1878, preserved in a collection of archive documents of exceptional value.
The collection contains probably the most complete set of sunspot data from the 19th century.
The over 5,400 drawings, made in pencil on sheets of paper, document with thin lines the size, shape and position of all the sunspots that Secchi and his collaborators managed to recognize with the help of the telescopes installed at the College observatory Roman, built a few years earlier on the roof of the church of Sant'Ignazio in the center of Rome.
These documents today belong to INAF and are preserved at the Astronomical Observatory of Rome, where they have recently been digitized to be analyzed in the light of current knowledge.
The researchers decided to ask for help from volunteers and enthusiasts because attempts to automate the recognition of sunspots with image analysis and machine learning techniques have so far not produced satisfactory results, due to the extreme variety of the content of the drawings.
“In addition to information on the location and area of the spots and pores (spot regions without penumbra areas), many drawings also report data on the facular regions, jets and protuberances observed together with the spots and pores, and information on the evolution of the regions examined", explains Ilaria Ermolli, INAF researcher. "Some notes alongside the drawings also document historical and natural events, such as the clashes taking place on the day of the breach of Porta Pia which led to the capture of Rome, and the observation of spectacular Northern Lights and geomagnetic storms.”
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