A Zoo of Galaxies?

My name is Brandon Kuschel, and I am a first year grad student at the University of Denver.  I study the behavior of dust around evolved stars using hydrodynamic models.

Rather than jumping right into describing my current work in detail, I'd like to start by plugging for a topic that I have been passionate about for quite a while: citizen science.  One of the largest such projects, along with being one of my personal favorites, is Galaxy Zoo.

Galaxy Zoo allows anyone to help with the classification of galaxies by their appearance.  As described in their history here, the site has been around since 2007.  At first, the team behind the site just asked volunteers to perform a basic classification.  They had the option to choose whether the image contained an elliptical galaxy, a spiral galaxy, or two galaxies merging.  After the initial project was complete, the team relaunched the site and called it (creatively enough) Galaxy Zoo 2.  This time, they asked for additional classification, mostly specific to spiral galaxies.  These questions included counting the number of spiral arms, giving the relative size of the central bulge, and saying whether or not the galaxy had a bar.

One big question you might have about Galaxy Zoo is why does it exist at all?  How could a team of researchers trust results they get from the Internet?  The Galaxy Zoo science pages located here and here provide an answer.  Data for Galaxy Zoo comes primarily from a photographic map of the universe called the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, or SDSS.  In the first phase of the project alone, there were 1.5 million galaxies to classify, far too many for a small group to handle.  By having multiple people look at each image, the team was able to get results just as good as if they had looked at all the images themselves.

More recent phases of Galaxy Zoo allow people to peer back into the early universe through images from Hubble's CANDELS survey.  However, no matter where the images come from, the appeal remains the same.  Participating in Galaxy Zoo allows members of the general public to be the first person-or at least one of the first few people-to see a galaxy.  Not only that, but the project has contributed data for numerous papers and led to follow-up observations on larger telescopes.

With the popularity of Galaxy Zoo, its creators decided to expand on the concept and create what they called the Zooniverse (I'll give them credit for creativity on that one).  This website includes projects with a similar idea that anyone can contribute to solve a large problem in topics as far ranging as climate science to biology/nature.  It also includes even more astronomy-related projects such as watching for solar storms, hunting for exoplanets, finding young stars, finding gravitational lenses, and matching gas jets to feeding black holes.