Latest Galaxy Zoo Stories

Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The heavens above are littered with trillions and trillions of stars packed into hundreds of  billions of galaxies that are being painstakingly mapped out by astronomers. The Galaxy Zoo project also incorporates the help of volunteers to map, and classify, the galaxies that have been found via the hundreds of thousands of telescope images. While most of these galaxies take on the classic spiral or elliptical shape, some have...

Black holes in the early universe needed a few snacks rather than one giant meal to fuel their quasars and help them grow, according to observations from NASA's Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes. Quasars are the brilliant beacons of light that are powered by black holes feasting on captured material, and in the process, heating some of the matter to millions of degrees. The brightest quasars reside in galaxies distorted by collisions with other galaxies. These encounters send lots of gas...

The reddest galaxies with the largest central bulb show the largest bars -gigantic central columns of stars and dark matter-, according to a scientific study that used Google Maps to observe the sky. A group of volunteers of more than 200,000 participants of the galaxy classification project Galaxy Zoo contributed to this research. More than two thirds of spiral galaxies, including our own Milky Way, display a central bar that can extend for thousands of light years. These colossal...

By Dauna Coulter - Science@NASA"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known," wrote Carl Sagan.And now you can be the one to find it, thanks to Zooniverse, a unique citizen science website. Zooniverse volunteers, who call themselves "Zooites," are working on a project called Galaxy Zoo, classifying distant galaxies imaged by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.1"Not only are people better than computers at detecting the subtleties that differentiate galaxies,...

One of the strangest space objects ever seen is being scrutinized by the penetrating vision of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. A mysterious, glowing green blob of gas is floating in space near a spiral galaxy. Hubble uncovered delicate filaments of gas and a pocket of young star clusters in the giant object, which is the size of our Milky Way galaxy.The Hubble revelations are the latest finds in an ongoing probe of Hanny's Voorwerp (Hanny's Object in Dutch), named for Hanny van Arkel, the...

With the help of the army of volunteers working on the Galaxy Zoo 2 "˜citizen science' project, an international team of scientists have discovered that the bars found in many spiral galaxies could be helping to kill them off. The researchers present their results in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.The overwhelming majority of stars in the universe are found in galaxies like our own Milky Way. These vast stellar assemblies contain anything between a few hundred...

Suzanne Taylor Muzzin, Yale UniversityWhile sorting through hundreds of galaxy images as part of the Galaxy Zoo citizen science project two years ago, Dutch schoolteacher and volunteer astronomer Hanny van Arkel stumbled upon a strange-looking object that baffled professional astronomers. Two years later, a team led by Yale University researchers has discovered that the unique object represents a snapshot in time that reveals surprising clues about the life cycle of black holes.In a new...

Scientists at University College London (UCL) and the University of Cambridge have developed machine-learning codes modeled on the human brain that can be used to classify galaxies accurately and efficiently. Remarkably, the new method is so reliable that it agrees with human classifications more than 90% of the time. The research will appear in a paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.There are billions of galaxies in the Universe, containing anything between...

Discovery may be in front of your home computer. As technology increases the amount of new information available in various fields of science such as oceanography, astronomy and ecology, researchers are turning to citizen scientists to unlock the data.In a study funded by the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Directorate for Education & Human Resources, researchers are studying an online suite of citizen-science projects called Zooniverse to determine the implications of public...

Astronomers on behalf of Galaxy Zoo have unveiled a new game aimed at letting players help them understand how galaxies have formed.The game involves images taken by a camera attached to a telescope in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Game participants are asked to match simulations of colliding galaxies, called galactic mergers.Astronomers say the human brain is much more reliable than even the fastest computer at classifying the shapes of colliding galaxies.The project is led by scientists...