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I AM peering deep into the cosmos. I can see a cluster of bright lights shining in the distance 鈥� a faraway galaxy. I click 鈥渟mooth鈥� 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 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. 鈥淪he noticed鈥� that there was this sort of blue sludge,鈥� says Karen Masters at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, who is part of Galaxy Zoo鈥檚 science team.
That blue sludge turned out to be a big deal. Named Hanny鈥檚 Voorwerp (Hanny鈥檚 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 鈥� 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 more 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鈥檚 crowdsourced data so far. When the project first started, machine learning techniques weren鈥檛 good enough for analysing galaxies. Nowadays, Galaxy Zoo relies on a mixture of machines and human interpretation 鈥� with some easy classifications now possible using artificial intelligence.
Galaxy Zoo鈥檚 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.
鈥淲hen 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,鈥� 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
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