Galaxy Zoo is five years' old today

[Nereid]

Actually, it's the Galaxy Zoo forum's fifth birthday.

One of the guys behind the whole initiative, Kevin Schawinski, wrote a rather nice "Object of the Day" today, about this:

The Object of the Day today is the Zoo itself. Five years ago, galaxyzoo.org went live, and the promptly died again when far, far more people that we ever hoped for logged on and wanted to classify galaxies. This led the server hosting the SDSS images to be overwhelmed and eventually melting a cable. Within hours, people were classifying more galaxies per hour than one of us (KS) did in a whole week. Clearly, people across the world were excited to contribute to Real Science Online.

It took a while to get adjusted to the amazing response from people. We had set up a Gmail account where people could get in touch with is. Soon, this account received about 1 email per second, and most of the Zoo team members were simultaneously logged into that account, trying to stem the tide of questions, suggestions, well-wishes and in one case, mails copying each classification one user made. This didn’t last very long as Google identified our account as spammers and shut it down.

The obvious solution to this problem was the forum. Here, the volunteers could not merely get together and start building a community, but also build up a storage of knowledge. the team could go answer questions, and then the answers were preserved, and new Zooites could get up to speed. But the forum quickly became more than just that. We like to describe it as the most polite place on the whole internet, which is saying something.

But more than that, the Zooites started doing their own science. Taking the Galaxy Zoo data as a starting point to other databases and then their own collaborative research projects. The Zooites on the forum discovered and defined the “peas” (intense starburst galaxies that look small, round and green) and the Voorwerp and its smaller cousins (dying echos of powerful accreting supermassive black holes) and much, much more.

Finally, the proof that the Zoo was working came in the form of results! We have so far published over 30 papers in peer-reviewed journals using the Zoo classifications as a critical source of knowledge; and not just about galaxies, but also cosmology and black holes. At the same time, the geniuses over at Zooniverse HQ were busy designing Galaxy Zoo’s cousins, some of them in astronomy, but others not: Planet Hunters, the Milky Way Project, Whale.fm and Ancient Lives.

So, if you fancy classifying some galaxies, or whale calls, or distant worlds, head over to zooniverse.org and have a look at what the Zoo started those five years ago....

Galaxy Zoo itself celebrated its fifth birthday two weeks' ago (on 11 July). Chris Lintott, the other Galaxy Zoo big cheese, wrote this, in a blog post:

What we still don’t know

I used to think that science was about discovery, about adding certainty to what we know about the Universe. Discoveries happen, of course, but I’ve learned that the really exciting stuff happens not when we expand our knowledge, but our ignorance; progress is measured in the number of unanswered questions we have. After all, any good result raises more of those than it answers.

I have this in mind because today is the 5th anniversary of the launch of Galaxy Zoo, and it’s tempting to write about how we – with your help – have magnificently fulfilled the vision we had back in 2007. After all, in that first story on the BBC news website; a youthful version of me chirps that “We hope that participants in Galaxy Zoo will not only contribute to science, but have a lot of fun along the way”. Science? Check. Fun? Check..

But did we really understand what we were getting into? Certainly not. We’ve rehearsed before the story that we didn’t understand the size of the response we would get, nor the undimmed enthusiasm for sharing in exploring the Universe that still motivates volunteers today. But on launch, we didn’t realize we needed this blog to explain what we were doing with the clicks, nor the forum; which (thanks to the efforts of Alice Sheppard and team) has played such an important role in defining Galaxy Zoo. We didn’t realize that ...

Who, among those reading this post, hasn't spent many a happy hour (or ten, or hundred, or ...) classifying galaxies (or hunting supernovae, or taking part in the "merger wars", or voting on voorwerpje candidates, or ...)?

Three cheers for Galaxy Zoo!

[ngc3314]

Oh, yeah! My fifth forum anniversary comes up next week. It's been career-changing (even if I am at an extreme). I owe a serious holiday turkey to whoever pointed me to that link (although I seem unable to figure out who that was by now). If it wold fit, I'd get a license plate saying ZOOROOLZ.

[parejkoj]

I'd love to take credit for pointing you at GZ, ngc3314. But I don't remember myself. If it was me, can I request a holiday tofurkey?

But yes, three cheers for the zooniverse! It's come a long way since the early beginnings.