We are all under the same sky. Sooner or later, we all raise our eyes to gaze at the stars in the celestial vault and wonder about the mysteries of the Universe. As humankind is tied to the skies, it is natural to expect a large participation in citizen science projects inspired by astronomy. However, the massive success of “Galaxy Zoo” exceeded expectations and lead the venture to the next phase, even opening up brand-new academic positions.
Citizen scientists are members of the public that contribute to genuine scientific research. They might count birds, fish or stars, play with proteins on their computers or look for oddities in images of the cosmos, and then send their results back to professional scientists. A long-established tradition for researchers, resorting to the so-called power of the crowds yields myriad benefits to both groups.
The “Galaxy Zoo” project has been running for almost three years. The organisers, a group of astronomers based in the UK and US, had the ambitious goal of asking the public to classify the shapes of a million galaxies. The zoo analogy is striking, as galaxies in the Universe have a plethora of different morphological features; when it comes to their overall shape, however, astronomers have basically two choices: spiral or elliptical.
Understanding the shape of a galaxy goes well beyond a simple catalogue compilation, as it identifies its formation and dynamical history: stars in a spiral galaxy rotate around the centre in an ordered fashion, whereas in an elliptical galaxy they move in a much more chaotic way. Beautiful images of nearby galaxies are usually straightforward to interpret, their stunning spiral arms or roundish appearance leaving astronomers with little doubt. Far away galaxies, instead, look more like small, undefined blobs and sorting them into these two classes is an extremely delicate task.
In the past decades, countless graduate students have devoted years to the classification of galaxy shapes, which is mostly performed via visual inspection. Even though modern astronomy is a highly computer-dominated discipline, it is not trivial to teach a machine how to recognise shapes, and the human brain is still the most powerful tool in this context. Given these premises, the potential of a scheme to involve citizen scientists in galaxy classification was huge, and the “Galaxy Zoo” team has fully exploited it.
Only a few days after the launch of the project’s website, 35 000 enthusiasts had completed the same amount of work that a graduate student could have performed devoting months to this sole task. Employing the public in these operations does not demote professional astronomers; instead, it enables them to perform research with plenty of new, fresh data, without having to perform the “dirty” job themselves. Using the “Galaxy Zoo” samples, astronomers have learned new, exciting details regarding the evolution and the distribution of different galaxies, and even discovered some unexpected and never-before-seen features. More than a dozen papers have already been published in international journals, and many others are in progress, thanks to the devotion of this immense community that self-styled themselves as “Zooites”.
After the first successful results, the project has already moved to the next level: a new online sample of galaxies is ready to be characterised in much greater detail than the previous one; members of the public can also look for additional features, such as mergers between neighbouring galaxies. And there’s more, as the project’s next step involves citizen and professional scientists alike.In order to turn the massive amount of data analysed by the community into proper results, one or more astronomers have to devote their entire energies to the “Galaxy Zoo” cause. On March 1st, a postdoctoral researcher will start working full time on this project at the University of Oxford, where it all began; soon another post-doc position will be filled at the University of Nottingham, and the Adler Planetarium, an astronomy museum with an active research group in Chicago, is recruiting scientists and software developers to join the “Galaxy Zoo” team.
This and other projects have provided innumerable members of the public with a chance to share the excitement of scientific discovery and to get a glimpse of how research works. In turn, the citizen scientists have contributed, over the years, to close the circle, dutifully delivering data and occasionally leading to scientific breakthroughs. Now, with citizen scientists literally employing professional astronomers, new research perspectives open: the circle has evolved into a spiral.
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This story is also an exercise i wrote just over a month ago...For more info about the project: www.galaxyzoo.org
Image credits: Galaxy Zoo and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
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