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Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Galaxy Zoo

Galaxy Zoo is a Zooniverse project. The current version of the project is Galaxy Zoo 2.
Galaxy Zoo 1 has already done a great job with help of all the people who participated in it.
Galaxy Zoo 1 was launched in July 2007, with a data set made up of a million galaxies imaged with the robotic telescope of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. With so many galaxies, the team thought that it might take at least two years for visitors to the site to work through them all. Within 24 hours of launch, the site was receiving 70,000 classifications an hour, and more than 50 million classifications were received by the project during its first year, from almost 150,000 people.

The task of the first Galaxy Zoo users was to split the galaxies into ellipticals and spirals and — if the galaxy was a spiral — record the direction of the arms.

For Galaxy Zoo 2 project the aim is a little bit different. Here are some of questions that users will need to answer through galaxy zoo 2:

  • Is the galaxy simply smooth and rounded, with no sign of a disk?
  • How rounded is the given galaxy?
  • Could the galaxy be a disk viewed edge-on? 
  • Does the galaxy have a bulge at its center? What shape is it?
  • Are there any signs of spiral arms?
  • etc....
 As you see it requires more information and consequently more work on the images, but in the core the idea is very simple and it can be of a great help to the scientific community.

So i encourage everyone to take part in, try classifying some galaxies and feel that you have done something even if it small.

Here the link for the project site http://www.galaxyzoo.org 
You can register here https://zooniverse.org/signup
You have to go through the tutorial first before you can begin the real work

I hope you find this useful. Have fun doing the scientists work :D

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