Galaxy Zoo

Galaxy Zoo is an online astronomy project which invites members of the public to assist in classifying over a million galaxies. The project is inspired by Stardust@home, where the public was asked by NASA to search images obtained from a mission to a comet for interstellar dust impacts. Galaxy zoo is a collaboration between Oxford University, Portsmouth University, Johns Hopkins University and Fingerprint Digital Media, Belfast

Purpose
Galaxy Zoo volunteers are asked to judge from the images whether the galaxies are elliptical or spiral and, if spiral, whether they are rotating in a clockwise or anti-clockwise direction. The images were taken automatically by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey using a digital camera mounted on a telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, United States. It is hoped this census will provide valuable information about how different kinds of galaxies are distributed, allowing scientists to determine whether existing galactic models are correct.

Theorists believe that spiral galaxies can merge and become ellipticals, and also that ellipticals can become spirals if they receive more gas or stars. In addition, Professor Michael Longo of the University of Michigan has claimed that the rotation of spiral galaxies is not random, which would force a major rethink of cosmology if it were correct. This is based on a survey of 1660 galaxies: a much larger sample could prove or disprove it.

Importance of volunteers
Computer programs have been unable to reliably classify the galaxies. According to a member of the team behind the project, Kevin Schawinski, "The human brain is actually much better than a computer at these pattern-recognition tasks." Without human volunteers, it would take researchers years to process the photographs, but it is estimated that with as few as 10,000 to 20,000 people giving up time to classify the galaxies, the process could be complete in one month.

No knowledge of astronomy is required. In the site's tutorial, would-be volunteers are shown spirals, ellipticals etc., and can try guessing before being shown the correct answer. Also shown are pictures of stars and satellite trails, which the robot telescope would have recorded without being able to classify them. Volunteers are then tested on some additional pictures and signed up if they get a reasonable number of correct results.

Previously unseen images
Chris Lintott, another member of the team behind the project commented that, "One advantage is that you get to see parts of space that have never been seen before. These images were taken by a robotic telescope and processed automatically, so the odds are that when you log on, that first galaxy you see will be one that no human has seen before." This was confirmed by Schawinski, "Most of these galaxies have been photographed by a robotic telescope, and then processed by computer. So this is the first time they will have been seen by human eyes."

Progress
On August 2, 2007, Galaxy Zoo issued its first newsletter which explained that 80,000 volunteers had already classified more than 10 million images of galaxies, meeting the goals for the first phase of the project. The aim now is


 * To have "each and every galaxy classified by 20 separate users. The importance of multiple classifications is that it will enable us to build an accurate and reliable database, that will meet the high standards of the scientific community.  For the first time, we'll be able to separate not only spirals from ellipticals, but obvious spirals from fainter, fuzzier things. No-one has ever been able to do this before.  (Newsletter).

Forum
There is now a forum attached to Galaxy Zoo, where volunteers post the more striking images and discuss what they are.