Galaxy Zoo

I would like spend a little time promoting the website known as Galaxy Zoo.  You can find it at www.galaxyzoo.org

Galaxy Zoo is this really neat way to get people to do science from their computers at home.  The idea is that Hubble and other telescopes produce too many images of galaxies for researchers to look at, and computers aren't very good at image recognition, so the researchers allow whoever wants to work on the project access to various images.  The researchers then have these people answer some simple questions that help define the characteristics of the galaxies.  The researchers can get thousands of answers for the same galaxy and then figure out which answer is the most likely to be accurate.  The people collecting data from Galaxy Zoo this are particularly interested in merging galaxies and sometimes you manage to find an image that contains two colliding galaxies!

When you first register for Galaxy Zoo, they'll put you through a straightforward tutorial and lure you in with awesome pictures like this spiral galaxy:

or this elliptical galaxy:

Once you log-in and start classifying galaxies, though, many of them will end up looking rather lumpy, kind of like this:

In spite of this initial false advertising, Galaxy Zoo is still a lot of fun and dangerously addicting.  I've already been distracted by it twice while writing this blog post.  If you feel guilty about procrastinating, this is a great way to put off your work without feeling bad, because it's still helping science progress.  It's probably even helping more than your latest physics set.  (Not that you needed any more motivation to procrastinate.)  Anyway, you occasionally do come across some really cool pictures.  They let you save any images that particularly grab your attention.  A few of my favorite galaxy images are below:

These are all images that I happened to find while classifying galaxies.  How does this whole classifying procedure work, I hear you asking?

The first thing you do is classify the galaxy as a smooth/elliptical galaxy, a spiral galaxy, or a star/artifact.  Galaxy Zoo then asks you about the shape if it's an elliptical galaxy and about tightness and number of spirals if it is a spiral galaxy.  They also ask about the presence of a bar and the prominence of the center bulge for spiral galaxies.  The last thing they ask about both types of galaxies is the most interesting:  Is there anything odd in the image?  If you pick yes for this question, then you get to specify what is so strange about this image.  Are there two merging galaxies?  Dust trails?  Is the galaxy irregular?  Perhaps most exciting is that you can specify lensing!  That's right, you can sometimes get images that show how galaxies can act as a gravitational lens!  It's quite rare, but if you see a star or another galaxy on one side of the main galaxy and then it appears again on the other side, the light coming from that object may be bending around the main galaxy and therefore the object looks like it's in multiple places!  Did I mention that I find this really cool?!  Unfortunately, I haven't come across any images of obvious gravitational lensing in any of the galaxies I've classified, but here is an example of an image in which somebody else on Galaxy Zoo found lensing:

The yellow blob is the galaxy and grey arc is the bent light from whatever object is behind the galaxy.  Isn't general relativity awesome?!  Perhaps I am getting overly excited...

If galaxies and their strange features aren't making you as excited as they are making me, then there are many other projects like Galaxy Zoo that have been created by Zooniverse. These projects all center on allowing the public try out a little science at home and letting humans pick up the slack where computers fall short.  So far, Zooniverse has projects for deciphering ancient Greek texts, examining the ice composition on Pluto and other objects on the edge of our solar system, looking for patterns that would indicate exoplanets in images from Kepler, looking for stellar nurseries in the Milky Way, examining features on the moon in images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and monitoring solar storms.  So before computers become good at pattern recognition in images, go to zooniverse.org and pick a project that catches your interest.  You never know when something really strange will pop up.  It might even lead to new science!