Astronomers need YOU to help create galaxy guide
How many arms does a spiral galaxy have? Can you spot a galaxy with a 'peanut' bulge? Or a galactic merger? Answers to these and other strange questions will be provided by ordinary web users who — by working together — have proven to be just as good at galaxy-spotting as professional astronomers. The new initiative is a follow-up to the highly successful Galaxy Zoo project that enabled members of the public to take part in astronomy research online. But where the original site only asked members of the public to log whether a galaxy was spiral or elliptical, and which way it was rotating, Galaxy Zoo 2 asks them to delve deeper into 250,000 of the brightest and best galaxies to search for the strange and unusual. The Galaxy Zoo 2 website was launched today at www.galaxyzoo.org Astronomers came up with the idea of getting online volunteers involved because the human brain is still better at doing pattern recognition tasks than a computer. What they had not expected was the huge enthusiasm for the project; in the last 18 months 80 million classifications of galaxies were submitted on one million objects at www.galaxyzoo.org by more than 150,000 armchair astronomers from all over the world. The Galaxy Zoo team is led by scientists from the University of Oxford, The University of Nottingham, the University of Portsmouth, Johns Hopkins University (USA), UC Berkley (USA), Penn State (USA), Adler Planetarium, Chicago (USA) and Yale (USA), and Fingerprint Digital Media of Belfast.
