Galaxy Zoo 2

August 22, 2009 9:10 PM

Galaxy Zoo 2: Help astronomers sort through 250,000 galaxies! The Sloan Digital Sky Survey found hundreds of thousands of galaxies which needed to be accurately classified; the original Galaxy Zoo project was a collaborative effort by tens of thousands of volunteers around the world to sort these galaxies into spiral and elliptical categories. Now, it's entered its second phase: describing the details of these galaxies. Read the tutorial, and then you can jump in and start classifying.

For those interested in the science from the first Galaxy Zoo, there's a brief rundown on the site, and a number of papers on arXiv. Galaxy Zoo has appeared previously here [1,2], and features Mefi's own edd.

posted by Upton O'Good (6 comments total)

Thanks for this post. It's really cool to think an average Joe can contribute something to modern science.
posted by Tashtego at 10:42 PM on August 22

That's really a time-suck! I've been at it for an hour...
posted by shrabster at 11:22 PM on August 22

thanks for this. As tashtego said, its cool to feel like im helping.

Its interesting to think that trillions of stars and countless planets and who knows how many living beings are all summed up in this little pixelated picture that im classifying.

Its also both fill me with awe and sadness that there is so much out there i have no chance to ever see, explore, or experience, because of the vastness of the universe and the finite limit of my life time.
posted by Merik at 12:09 AM on August 23

The Green Peas are really interesting. People started noticing small, bright green galaxies, and a team on the forums self organised to hunt for more of them.

It turns out they'd discovered a new group of galaxies that are much less massive than our own galaxy, and form stars so fast that their stellar mass doubles in just tens of millions of years.
posted by lucidium at 3:51 AM on August 23

OK, this is just weird. I've been sitting on the idea of posting this for months, and this morning I was really truly going to do it ... and I find that Upton O'Good has been up to no good. Curses! Oh well, I guess it would have made a good post after all. A tip of the hat to Mr. O'Good!
posted by Quietgal at 8:56 AM on August 23

This project is really cool. It also really hits that ocd/organize everything spot I've got. I think of this gigantic dataset they've got and then think of all these people sorting it by hand and verifying other people's sorting and it makes me happy.
posted by kms at 2:42 PM on August 23