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Microlensing Anomaly Review

Help verify light curves the AI detector was unsure about. Your consensus trains the model; your disagreement flags discoveries.

How to read a light curve

A light curve is just a plot of how bright a star looks over time. Two axes:

  • Horizontal axis — Time Each point is one night the telescope looked at the star. Left = earlier, right = later.
  • Vertical axis — Brightness How much light we received. Up = brighter, down = fainter. A microlensing event is a temporary brightening, so it appears as a hump.
  • Baseline The star's normal, steady brightness when nothing is happening.

Note: astronomers measure brightness in magnitudes, where the number gets smaller as an object gets brighter. On this platform we always orient the plot so up = brighter to keep it intuitive.

The three shapes you'll see

Microlensing ✦

  • One smooth hump — rises and falls a single time.
  • Roughly symmetric (the rise mirrors the fall).
  • Returns to the flat baseline afterward and stays there.
  • The signal we're hunting — a lensing mass passing in front.

Variable star

  • Repeats — regular ups and downs, a periodic rhythm.
  • No single isolated event; the pattern keeps going.
  • A real star pulsating or an eclipsing pair — not lensing.

Noise / junk

  • Scattered points, no coherent shape.
  • Bad weather, instrument glitches, or a faint messy target.
  • Nothing to classify — mark as noise.

Practice

Look at the curve, make your call, then reveal the answer. No score is recorded — this is just to build your eye.