Galaxy Zoo – 2010

This month we were delighted to welcome Dr Chris Lintott of Oxford University to our society. As well as pursuing a successful academic career as a university lecturer, and researcher into the processes which form stars and galaxies, Chris is a well known author and the co-presenter of the Sky at Night.

Chris spoke about the success of Galaxy Zoo in opening up new ways to conduct astronomical research, by engaging the general public to help sift through, analyse and classify the mountains of images of galaxies collected by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Some 260,000 members of the general public have already performed over 50 million classifications of images of galaxies, leading astronomers to a deeper understanding of the distribution of types of galaxies, overturning several myths, and even discovering new objects such as Hanny’s Voorwerp and “Peas”.

Galaxy Zoo has already spawned several related projects to help researchers sift through other similarly large datasets.

• Galaxy Zoo 2 – looking in more detail into nearby galaxies
• Solar Storm Watch – looking for the next big solar storm
• Galaxy Zoo SuperNovae – helping spot new supernovae
• Galaxy Zoo mergers – understanding how galaxy collisions have happened.

You can find them all at http://zooniverse.org/home

Several other exciting projects are presently under development too, so watch that space! :)