Help astronomers find the next breakthrough with Galaxy Zoo

The mysteries of the universe have long fascinated humanity, but with the advent of modern technology, we are closer than ever to uncovering its secrets. However, why let the scientists have all the fun? Now, you can have your own crack at discovering the next big thing in the sky with the Galaxy Zoo Project and the Euclid Challenge.

Both projects harness the power of citizen science, enabling ordinary people to contribute to astronomical discoveries. By exploring and classifying galaxies or helping map dark energy, these projects offer a unique opportunity for anyone with an internet connection to participate in meaningful scientific research.

The Galaxy Zoo Project

The Galaxy Zoo Project first debuted back in 2007 as an online platform where volunteers from around the globe can help classify galaxies by their shapes using images from major astronomical surveys. With millions of galaxies captured by telescopes such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), automated algorithms alone struggle to process all the data accurately. That's where human volunteers come in, offering their unparalleled pattern recognition abilities to identify different types of galaxies.

At its core, Galaxy Zoo aims to better understand the structure and evolution of galaxies by categorising them into types like elliptical, spiral, and irregular. This classification is crucial because it helps scientists learn more about how galaxies form, grow, and interact over time. Since its inception, Galaxy Zoo has contributed to numerous scientific papers and led to the discovery of rare galaxies, such as the Green Pea galaxies and Hanny’s Voorwerp, a mysterious glowing cloud of gas.

Hanny's Voorwerp (Dutch for "Hanny's object") is an astronomical phenomenon known as a quasar ionization echo. It was discovered in 2007 by Dutch schoolteacher Hanny van Arkel, who was volunteering with the Galaxy Zoo project.

By identifying and categorising galaxies, citizen scientists can contribute to our understanding of how the universe has evolved over billions of years. This research can also shed light on larger cosmological questions, such as the role of dark matter in galaxy formation and the ultimate fate of the universe.

The Euclid Challenge

The Euclid Challenge is tied to the Euclid mission, launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) to map the geometry of the universe and better understand dark energy and dark matter—the two mysterious substances that make up 95% of the universe's content. The Euclid spacecraft, equipped with a powerful 1.2-metre telescope, is observing billions of galaxies across a third of the sky, measuring their shapes and redshifts to trace how the universe has expanded over time.

The mission's primary goal is to solve one of the most significant mysteries in modern cosmology: the nature of dark energy, which is believed to drive the accelerated expansion of the universe. By mapping how galaxies cluster and how light bends around massive objects, Euclid is helping scientists test theories of gravity and expansion. The data from Euclid will provide unprecedented insight into the large-scale structure of the universe, offering clues about its ultimate fate.

In conjunction with this mission, the Euclid Challenge engages citizen scientists to participate in tasks such as identifying gravitational lenses—areas where massive galaxies warp space-time and magnify the light of more distant objects. This phenomenon not only provides vital information about the universe's structure but also allows scientists to refine their models of dark matter distribution.

Gravitational lensing is a phenomenon where the gravity of a massive object, like a galaxy or black hole, bends and magnifies the light from a more distant object behind it. This effect allows astronomers to observe distant galaxies or other cosmic objects that would otherwise be too faint or obscured.

How can you get involved?

If you’re fascinated by the universe and want to help uncover its secrets, both the Galaxy Zoo Project and Euclid Challenge offer ways for you to participate, regardless of your background in science.

Visit the Galaxy Zoo website, sign up for free, and begin classifying galaxies, objects, and more. You'll be presented with real images of galaxies, and after a short tutorial, you can start categorising them by shape. This simple process helps professional astronomers make sense of the vast amounts of data collected by telescopes.

In a recent update ESA’s Euclid images were also added to the Galaxy Zoo database, meaning you can directly contribute to some of the latest and most cutting-edge astronomical projects. A big part of this side of the project is to identify gravitational lenses. These distortions in space-time are not always easy for computers to spot, so human eyes play a critical role.

Get involved on the Galaxy Zoo website.