The latest 'citizen science' project to hit the astronomical shelves is a really fun investigation into the HII (ionised hydrogen) bubbles that form around young, ionising stars or Supernovae explosions. The issue here is that they can be very complex shapes as the shock wave around such ionising sources will typically flow around dense interstellar gas. This means that identifying such objects will be difficult for automated systems but easy for humans with our pretty impressive pattern recognition skills. This is the idea of the project - harness the power of people for a problem that we can uniquely solve.
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A series of N-body simulations (so gravity only, no worrying about computationally expensive, or indeed theoretically poorly understood gas and stellar physics) of objects that are of similar total mass to the Milky Way halo. So far so Aquarius (which indeed this paper uses) but the nice take on the problem is that the Dark Matter is assumed to self-interact. There's no theoretical reason why it shouldn't (and indeed they reference a Yukawa-like gauge boson interaction that might have just such a velocity-dependent interaction cross-section) but that's beyond my area of expertise, besides it's not a new idea so feel free to wiki it probably. Instead all we need to know is that this could happen and if so, what are the consequences of Dark Matter that can?
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