Discover Galaxies on the Web

Reported August 2010

NEW HAVEN, Conn. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Here's a quick astronomy quiz for you, how many rings does Uranus have? What are stars mostly made of? If you answered "11" and "balls of gas," you're right. But if you didn't answer correctly, don't worry you still have a shot at becoming an astronomer.

Space, the mystery intrigues us all! Now a new website is helping solve some of our questions.

"In the 21st century there are telescopes that are so powerful, it’s become impossible to go sort through them by yourself or in a small team of researchers,” Kevin Schawinski, an astrophysicist at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., told Ivanhoe.

Yale University astrophysicist Kevin Schawinski is turning ordinary citizens into astronomers. He created galaxyzoo.org, where people log in to classify galaxies.

"Within 10 minutes anybody could go and learn to go classify and recognize galaxies as well as a professional astronomer,” Schawinski explained.

All you have to do is answer a series of questions describing the way the galaxy looks.

“The current project that is live is called Hubble Zoo where we've taken images from the Hubble Space Telescope,” Carolin Cardamone, a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University, said. “These are some of the deepest images into our universe."

The site has led to discoveries like the green pea galaxies. They're between one-point-five and five billion light years away, and are 100-times smaller than the Milky Way, but form stars 10 times faster.

"It really takes the human brain and human perception to go say that's odd,” Schawinski said. “The computer would have been unlikely to recognize the peas as unusual and flag them up."

Galaxy Zoo was first launched in 2007. Today, it's reached over a quarter million users. It started with one website in English, but now they're working to create websites in German, French, Spanish and Chinese.

The American Geophysical Union contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

Kevin Schawinski
Contact Person
(203) 432-9759
kevin.schawinski@yale.edu

Peter Weiss
American Geophysical Union
Washington, DC 20009-1277
(202) 777-7507
http://www.agu.org
pweiss@agu.org

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Erin Richard, Publicist
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http://www.mysticseaport.org

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