Discover New Galaxies

From Tony Darnell, over at Astronomy Buff, we learn about Galaxy Zoo, a project which harnesses the power of the internet - and your brain - to classify a million galaxies. Tony says, "There is simply too much data coming in from all the telescopes and space probes looking at the universe for one person, or even a small team of scientists, to get through."

The folks at Galaxy Zoo say that a computer program "would do a reasonable job, but it would also inevitably throw out the unusual, the weird and the wonderful." They claim that the human brain is much better at recognising patterns than a computer can ever be.

The Galaxy Zoo team includes scientists from the University of Oxford, the University of Portsmouth and Johns Hopkins University (USA), and Fingerprint Digital Media of Belfast.

Visitors to Galaxy Zoo will get to see stunning images of galaxies, most of which have never been viewed by human eyes before. By sorting these images into “spiral galaxies” (like our own Milky Way) or “elliptical galaxies”, visitors will help astronomers to understand the structure of the universe. The new digital images were taken using the robotic Sloan Digital Sky Survey telescope in New Mexico.

Phil Plait, of the Bad Astronomy blog, says, "The interface is slick and clean, and they really do give you everything you need. They send the same galaxy to multiple users, and see what kind of consensus they get on the morphology (shape) of the galaxy."

If you are interested in contributing to the exploration of our universe, visit Galaxy Zoo and find out how you can help.