We would like to thank all the amazing jet hunters that participated to the project so far, and found hundreds of jets in the data.

The project is currently running and we need your help to analyze the data!

Summary of results

We compiled part of the results from the project in our first version of the Solar Jet Hunter catalogue (see below, section "Results from the first run of the project"). The catalogue with these jets is available for download here. We provide a tutorial and some examples on how to use this catalogue (using Python) in this GitHub repository.

Below are a summary of the project milestones since launch.

Project milestones

Project launch

Solar Jet Hunter was launched on Dec 7 2021 with data from the Solar Dynamic Observatory taken in 2011. This data set contains 1819 subjects and they were all analyzed in the workflow "Jet or Not" in a few hours! We added data from 2012 and 2013 (2118 subjects) and less than two days later, these data sets were also fully analyzed in the workflow "Jet or Not".

Jets were reported in 1213 of the subjects described above, and these 1213 subjects are now available for analysis in the workflow "Box the jets".

Example of particularly interesting events that have been reported by the volunteers are presented in this blog post.

An example of classification by the volunteers is shown below: the white box is the average box for the jet, the blue cross is the average position of the jet base at the beginning of the movie, and the yellow cross is the average position of the base of the jet at the end of the movie.

Results from the first run of the project

On February 5 all the jets were completely boxed, well done to all the jet hunters who contributed to our project!
In the following weeks the Solar Jet Hunter scientists worked on aggregating all the annotations from the volunteers to create "averaged" answers for each subject. They also work on a pipeline which associate consecutive subjects together to follow solar jets that are present in several subjects. Read more about this in this blog post.

A sample of jets found in the first run of the Solar Jet Hunter project.

During the academic year 2021-2022, Paloma Jol, second-year master student at Leiden University (the Netherlands), did her research project on the Solar Jet Hunter. She participated to the preparation of the data for the project and the aggregation after the classification by the volunteers. She submitted her thesis in June 2022 and some of her analysis is described in this blog post.

In 2023, the science team finalized the first Solar Jet Hunter catalogue, containing 883 jets found by the volunteers, in solar data from 2011 to 2016. Below is a visual summary of where the jets were found on the solar disk, with the color of each circle referring to the time when the jet occurred, and the size of the circle referring to the height of the box that was determined by the volunteers for this jet.

Summary of base location and box height for all jets reported in the first catalogue of Solar Jet Hunter

The catalogue with these jets is available for download here. We provide a tutorial and some examples on how to use this catalogue (using Python) in this GitHub repository.

Second and third runs of the Solar Jet Hunter

In April we launched the project with new data from years 2014-2015, which consisted of 2897 subjects. Again, you, the amazing solar jet hunter, did a great job at classifying the jets in this data! We are currently aggregating this data. Some examples of the jets found during this second run are shown in this blog post.

The new Solar Jet Hunter

On October 31st 2023, we re-launched the project in a new form. The website has a new look, and the subjects are now videos with many more frames than the 15 frames available in previous runs.
Subjects extracted from observations of SDO/AIA made in 2017 and 2018 are currently available in the project. Like before, we need your help! Join the hunt for solar jets!

March 2024: the full initial data set is analyzed!

In March 2024, we reach an important milestone was reached as the volunteers finished the analysis of our initial data set, which consist of data from 2011 to 2024, in which jets were reported in the Heliophysics Knowledge Database (HEK). Since then the research team is working on aggregating the data to construct a complete catalogue of jets, stay tuned for the results!

Citizen science investigation: validation of our video tool

The first part of the data set (data from 2011-2016) was analyzed with a "movie strip" tool, and the second part of the data (data from 2017-2023) has been analyzed with a video tool (see section "The new Solar Jet Hunter" above). This constitute a change in our methodology and we want to check if there are any bias in the result introduced by this change: to do so, we ask our volunteers to re-analyze a subset of the data that was analyzed with the movie strip, but this time, with the video tool. This is what is currently ongoing! We think the result of that comparison will be interesting for other and future citizen science projects as well, as it will be a comparison between two different tools available in Zooniverse.