Hubble's 20th birthday treat

The Hubble Space Telescope is 20 years old this week and, to mark this anniversary, astronomers are asking volunteers to help classify thousands of new images of galaxies. As part of the birthday celebrations NASA's Space Telescope Science Institute and the online astronomy project Galaxy Zoo are making almost 200,000 Hubble images of galaxies available to the public at www.galaxyzoo.org . They hope that volunteers from around the world looking for their own favourite galaxies will join forces to give the venerable telescope a present - classifications of each galaxy which will help astronomers understand how the Universe we see around us formed. Visitors to the site will be asked to answer simple questions about what they are seeing - for example, identifying the number of spiral arms visible, or spotting galaxies in the process of merging. More than 250,000 people have already contributed to Galaxy Zoo since its launch in 2007, but so far they have been looking only at the local Universe. 'Hubble will enable us to look back in time, to the era when many of the galaxies we see today were forming,' said Dr Chris Lintott of Oxford University's Department of Physics, Galaxy Zoo principal investigator. 'As a kid I always wanted a time machine for my birthday, but this is the next best thing!' 'The large surveys that Hubble has completed allow us to trace the Universe's evolution better than ever before,' said University of Nottingham astronomer and Galaxy Zoo team member Dr Steven Bamford.