NASA Launches Overlap Zoo to Map Cosmic Dust with Citizen Scientists

NASA’s new Overlap Zoo project invites volunteers to help identify pairs of galaxies that appear to overlap from Earth or space telescopes. When one galaxy lies in front of another, the foreground dust casts dark silhouettes against the background galaxy’s light, allowing astronomers to map dust distribution and study how it absorbs, scatters, and dims starlight. By building the largest catalog of such overlapping pairs, scientists aim to refine distance estimates to far‑away objects and improve models of galactic evolution. Volunteers can start classifying images with no prior experience, contributing directly to the first large‑scale dust‑study dataset.