Huge galaxy cluster »

Two volunteer astronomers have had a galaxy cluster named after them after finding the galaxy in an international citizen science project co-led by ANU. The two Russians identified the huge C-shaped galaxy cluster from much smaller images of cosmic radio waves shown to them as part of the web-based Radio Galaxy Zoo program. The discovery surprised the astronomers running the Radio Galaxy Zoo program, said project co-leader Dr Julie Banfield of the ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO) at the ANU. "They found something that none of us had even thought would be possible," Dr Banfield said. More than 10,000 volunteers have joined in with Radio Galaxy Zoo, classifying over 1.6 million images from NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer telescope and the NRAO Very Large Array in New Mexico in the United States. "The dataset is just too big for any individual or small team to plough through - but we have already reached almost 60 per cent completeness," Dr Banfield said. "Although radio astronomy is not as pretty as optical images from the Hubble space telescope, people can find cool things, like black holes, quasars, spiral galaxies or clusters of galaxies." The project is led by Dr Banfield and Dr Ivy Wong from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) at The University of Western Australia.