Galaxy Zoo adds to its menagerie

Oxford / Galaxy Zoo

One of the galaxies identified through the Galaxy Zoo program looks like the profile of a penguin with its beak pointing toward the left. Does that elliptical grouping of stars under the penguin's beak look like an egg?


Galaxy Zoo has added another 250,000 galaxies to its menagerie, and is looking for hundreds of thousands of volunteers to put them in their proper pigeonholes.

The latest phase of the global galaxy-classification project kicked off today with a refurbished website and lots of fresh imagery from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey as well as the Hubble CANDELS survey. Researchers used automatic image-recognition software to harvest the 250,000 new images of galaxies, "most of which have never been seen by humans," the project's organizers said in a news release.

Now it's the humans' turn ... again.


More than 250,000 people have taken part in the Galaxy Zoo project since its founding in 2007. More than a million images from Sloan and Hubble already have been sorted, based on the size and shape of the galaxies shown. That process has yielded more than two dozen scientific papers, delving into the statistics of galaxy formation, the process of citizen science, and some of the oddities that the volunteers have come across over the years.

Perhaps the best known of those oddities is Hanny's Voorwerp, a strange green blob that was spotted by Dutch teacher Hanny van Arkel in 2007 and touched off years of study. Just last year, researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope explained how blasts from a black hole lit up a cloud of gas to create the effect.

Other curiosities include galaxies that look like numbers and letters of the alphabet — so much so that there's a website called My Galaxies that can make the stars spell out your message. There are other galaxies that look like animals — enough of them to populate an entire online zoo with celestial elephants, dinosaurs, snails, fish and the Penguin Galaxy you see here.

Who knows what folks will find now that Galaxy Zoo has been expanded?

"We’d like to thank all those that have taken part in Galaxy Zoo in the past five years. Humans are better than computers at pattern recognition tasks like this, and we couldn’t have got so far without everyone’s help,” Galaxy Zoo's principal investigator, Chris Lintott from the University of Oxford, said in today's release. "Now we’ve got a new challenge, and we’d like to encourage volunteers old and new to get involved. You don’t have to be an expert — in fact we’ve found not being an expert tends to make you better at this task. There are too many images for us to inspect ourselves, but by asking hundreds of thousands of people to help us we can find out what’s lurking in the data."

If galaxies aren't exactly in your groove, there are other citizen-science projects to choose from in the Zooniverse. Here are just a few:


Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Discuss this post

Dark Matter and the expansion of our Universe
Dark Matter Dark Universe
We have named it dark matter, but we don't know what it is or were it comes from. We think we know what it is doing to our universe, causing it to expand, but we don't how.
The Discover magazine June 2012, there is an article on page 16 by astrophysicists Catherine Heymans and Ludovic Van Waerbeke called, "Largest map of dark matter across the cosmos. Also that their map covers 100 times as much as previous dark matter surveys, and reveals giant heaps of dark matter enveloping galaxies.
There is a lot of talk and theory's about dark matter and dark energy, but no one says were it comes from. We know it's their but don't know what it is or how it got their.
I propose that Dark Matter does not exist in our normal universe. Normal meaning the universe that we perceive and observe with our telescopes, satellite instrumentation, electronic devices, and eyes. Only with our large particle accelerators, fusion and plasma experiments do we get a sense of what might be possible and what might not be normal in our universe.
Stars are born and Stars die. It is a continuous cycle in our expanding universe, however mass in our universe is decreasing and black holes are responsible, and that dark matter is the byproduct of matter that falls into black holes throughout our universe. Black holes are the natural occurring system that breaks matter down into it's elemental particles and properties. I would call it the Black Hole Process. We use particle accelerators to achieve the same effect. Black hole formation started after the new very large gas clouds and hot stars started exploding and imploding after the Big Bang . It's thought to be one hundred billion galaxies in this universe, and at the center of most of them a massive black hole exists. The black hole at the center of our galaxy is said to have the mass of two point four million solar masses or more.
The matter falling into a black hole is converted into plasma the fourth state of mater, and whatever other exotic particles that may exist, releasing vast amounts of energy in the process. Once this converted mass passes through the event horizon it is no longer in our normal universe but what in what I could call the Dark Matter Universe or Black Hole Space. The powerful forces of magnetism and gravity acts as a one way barrier between the two universes. It could be the parallel universe that is theorized about.
A star orbiting a black hole is an example of a loss of mass in our universe. Eventually all of the star's mass will be consumed by the black hole. Where does it go when it passes into the event horizon?
How would the Dark Matter Universe cause our universe to expand?
Place markers on a large balloon and blow it up. The outer skin of the balloon where the markers are represents our universe. The inner skin represents the barrier between the two universes. The nozzle of the balloon would represent black holes, the one-way portals between the two universes and the air in the balloon would represent Dark Matter and dark energy. The markers will move apart as the balloon expands. The more you inflate the farther the they will move apart, the faster the inflation the faster the expansion.
The Dark Matter Universe is expanding because of the mass from our universe is pouring into it from all over our universe through the black hole process. That would explain the reason why Dark Matter seems not to be uniform in consistency. If there are no Black Holes in the area or gravity wells perhaps the Dark Matter would be less dense. At the center of most spiral galaxies massive black holes exist, and that's were the dark matter would be most dense. Our galaxy it self would have a tremendously large gravity well. Perhaps that's why their seems to be a shell of dark matter clumped around our galaxy. In a article the magazine discover Sept 2002 they spoke of that. As mass from our universe decreases, mass in the Dark Matter universe increases causing a deferential in gravity or pressure from the increase in mass and expansion could increase. Looking at it from this point of view, it would explain the expansion theory leading up to the cold death of our universe. However even though our universe may expand into coldness, the black hole process will continue to consume whatever matter is available and send it into the Dark Matter Universe. This expansion could keep on going until most of the matter in our universe is consumed, it's also possible that the Dark matter universe could expand to the bursting point and another Big Bang could occur. Not unlike a balloon that bursts when inflated too much. This would explain the big bang theory, and the possibility that the universe that we are in now is just another cycle in a continuous process of multiple universes after each Big Bang. The ultimate form of recycling. Truly a never ending loop into infinity. Written 7/4/12 G. Lowell.S
See my next article "CERN AND BLACK HOLES" for more info.

    Reply#1 - Tue Sep 11, 2012 1:34 PM EDT

    Uh, actually most astrophysicists believe the universe is still expanding from the Big Bang, and that Dark Energy (not Dark Matter) is accelerating the expansion.

    • 1 vote
    #1.1 - Tue Sep 11, 2012 3:04 PM EDT
    Reply

    Uh, actually most astrophysicists believe the universe is still expanding from the Big Bang, and that Dark Energy (not Dark Matter) is accelerating the expansion

    EricH-3359508: Agreed! It is dark energy that's overcoming the force of gravity. Whereas dark matter keeps galaxies from flying apart.

    Here's my two cents, uhm, ah.. theory on "dark" astrophysics. In additon to dark energy and dark matter there is dark flow, which appears to be creating an effect like a river in our part of the universe. The rivers current is moving us towards a specific point in the sky. Perhaps it is another universe creating this effect; we will 'flow' faster and faster until the rushing current takes our galaxy along with millions of others to the edge of.... Just a thought :-)

    • 1 vote
    Reply#2 - Tue Sep 11, 2012 6:55 PM EDT

    I'll go along with it being "just a thought" (thinking is usually a good thing). I've heard of flows of matter (maybe even dark matter) and a "great attractor" that is influencing our motion through the universe, but never anything quite like what you describe.

    • 1 vote
    #2.1 - Wed Sep 12, 2012 12:56 AM EDT
    Reply
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