28 November 2020 | New Scientist | 51The back pages
NASAIMAGE^ COLLE
CTIO
N/ALAMYLayal Liverpool is a
digital journalist at
New Scientist. She believes
everyone can be a scientist,
including you. @layallivs
These articles are
posted each week at
newscientist.com/makerWhat you need
Internet access
A web browser opened
to galaxyzoo.org/
I AM peering deep into the
cosmos. I can see a cluster of bright
lights shining in the distance – a
faraway galaxy. I click “smooth”
when asked about its shape. I am
an armchair astronomer, flicking
through telescope images to help
researchers who are studying
remote galaxies.
There are more images from
telescopes than researchers could
ever analyse on their own. Since
the Galaxy Zoo citizen science
project was launched more
than 10 years ago, hundreds of
thousands of people have helped
identify more than a million
galaxies of a wide variety of shapes
and sizes as well as identifying
previously undiscovered
interstellar phenomena.
This is exactly what happened
to Dutch schoolteacher Hanny
van Arkel in 2007, when working
through images on Galaxy Zoo
gathered by the Sloan Digital Sky
Survey. “She noticed... that there
was this sort of blue sludge,”
says Karen Masters at Haverford
College in Pennsylvania, who is
part of Galaxy Zoo’s science team.
That blue sludge turned out
to be a big deal. Named Hanny’s
Voorwerp (Hanny’s object in
Dutch) after its discoverer, it was
in fact an extremely hot cloud of
gas which was being lit up by light
from a quasar – a bright, energetic
object powered by a supermassive
black hole at the centre of a galaxy
called IC 2497. The cloud can be
seen in the image above, below
the galaxy and rendered in green.
Researchers have since
discovered and analysed moreYou can help astronomers explore distant galaxies from the
comfort of your living room. Layal Liverpool explains howCitizen science
Zooming into outer space
of these objects. Patterns in the
light from them help us identify
past changes in the galaxies that
illuminate them.
More than 60 scientific
papers have been published by
astronomers using Galaxy Zoo’s
crowdsourced data so far. When
the project first started, machine
learning techniques weren’t good
enough for analysing galaxies.
Nowadays, Galaxy Zoo relies on a
mixture of machines and human
interpretation – with some easy
classifications now possible
using artificial intelligence.
Galaxy Zoo’s latest set of images
comes from the Dark Energy
Camera Legacy Survey, which is
10 times more sensitive to light
than the Sloan Digital Sky Survey,
allowing the galaxies to be seen
in unprecedented detail.While you will see snapshots
of these vast objects, there is
much more to them.
“When we look at a picture of
a galaxy, it looks static, it looks
frozen in time, but these are
actually very dynamic objects,
everything is moving, there are
giant collections of stars, gas and
dust orbiting around the common
centre of mass,” says Masters.
Looking through the starry
images was strangely soothing
to me. If you are looking for a new
hobby, I can highly recommend
exploring the vastness of space
from the comfort of your sofa.
To join the effort, just head to
galaxyzoo.org/. ❚Feedback
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