If you can tell a Frisbee from a football, astronomy wants your help. And you don't even need a telescope.
The Galaxy Zoo, an Internet-based astronomy project, is seeking amateurs to help in the important task of dividing a million different galaxies into their two main subdivisions: spiral galaxies, such as our Milky Way, where stars move in circular orbits like a rotating Frisbee; and elliptical galaxies, where the stars move on randomly oriented, elliptical paths, and look a bit like a football.
It is a triage process that is quite simple for the human eye but very difficult for a computer, according to Alex Szalay, a Johns Hopkins University astrophysics professor and one of the organizers of Galaxy Zoo. Dividing the galaxies into categories will allow astronomers to study how they relate to one another, Szalay said, and provide clues that might help scientists understand how they form.
Launched in July, the project has been an immediate hit, with 85,000 volunteers registered on the site, including some who have done 15,000 classifications on their own, according to Szalay.
The way it works is you log onto the galaxyzoo.org website and a galaxy will be displayed on your screen. After looking at it, you choose one of several options for what the orientation looks like (don't worry, there's a "don't know" button if it's unclear). Your analysis is then compared with others who have seen the same galaxy to improve accuracy.
Szalay said the project is part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey - a massive sky-mapping project - and was triggered by a recent controversial theory that stars in one hemisphere of the universe are turning one way while stars in another are turning the other way. While the data gathered from Galaxy Zoo will play an important role in astronomy, Szalay said the lasting impact of the project may be in the number of amateurs it has helped to turn on to astronomy.
Tom Dicesare, a 44-year-old scientific illustrator from Wayland, said his interest in astronomy usually stopped at keeping an eye out for a well-publicized meteor shower. But after hearing about Galaxy Zoo, he signed on and gave it a try and has been fascinated by what comes across his screen.
"It feels like an opportunity to be a part of something really amazing," he said. "Sometimes you'll see two colliding galaxies, and the interaction between the two is fascinating. If you see something out of the ordinary you e-mail it in, and you hope to come across something like that because it could be some type of galaxy that no one has ever seen before."
Dicesare's reaction has been typical of participants, Szalay said, and he hopes that by taking astronomy out of the classroom, the project can help build the future generation of astronomers.
"If even one person gets started in astronomy because of this project," he said, "then we made a difference."
boston.com
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