Helping scientists explore the universe: Galaxy Zoo

If you have an interest in astronomy, why not help scientists to classify the hundreds of thousands of amazing images of galaxies taken by the Hubble telescope. More than 250,000 people already have helped the Galaxy Zoo team to classify galaxies according to shape, by determining the presence of features in an image, such as spiral arms and the prominence of a galaxy’s central bulge. According to the Galaxy Zoo team, humans are much better at classifying the images than a computer.

In the latest project, some of the images to be classified come from the Extended Groth Strip, which contains at least 50,000 galaxies.

Before signing up, you can try your hand at classifying the features: http://www.galaxyzoo.org/how_to_take_part. They say there often isn’t always a clearly ‘correct’ answer and provide a wide range of images to help us practice. Just click on the galaxy images provided to find out the zoo team’s answers. It’s simple to join the project, and not only is it a great way to view some of the best images of the universe but we can also help researchers in their quest to understand how the galaxies formed.

Posted on January 28, 2011