Category Archives: News

News

Stargazing Live: The Results Are In

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IMG_1172
The Lovell Telescope observing 9io9: a candidate lens spotted by volunteers on Space Warps.

BBC Stargazing Live 2014 has been asking people to visit the Zooniverse’s Space Warps site to identify gravitational lenses: extremely rare events caused by one galaxy passing in front of another (very distant) galaxy. Tens of thousands of you have taken part and classified more than 6.5 million images.

Your classifications have already led to the discovery of more than 50 potential gravitational lenses! Amongst them are several beautiful and interesting discoveries. You can see a few of our favourite candidates above. For Stargazing Live’s third and final show we have focussed on the spectacular red arc/ring shown below, it has been nicknamed 9io9 by the team right now, because of it’s Zooniverse ID. You can see more of what our volunteers are saying about it here on Talk.

Credit: Jim Geach / VICS82
Credit: Jim Geach / VICS82

The Space Warps team have produced a model of it and currently think the background (red) galaxy is at redshift of about 2, which means the light has taken more than 10 billion years to reach us! You can see the comparison of the model and the data below. There’s a chance it could be further away but we’ll keep you posted. The nearer object (white/yellow) is about 2 billion light years away and has a mass of 100 billion times that of our Sun – which makes it about the same size as our own galaxy.

Model_and_Data_Credit_A_More
Comparison of the model (left) and real (right) data.

We know all this because we have spent the last 24 hours calling in every favour we have worldwide. The Space Warps science team, and various Zooniverse scientists from other projects, have been literally asking favours from people using the world’s biggest telescopes. We were even able to get some time on the massive Keck telescope in Hawai’i, where astronomers were having to break ice off the dome to get data. Astronomers love a good challenge!

Of course Stargazing Live is filmed at Jodrell Bank, home to one of the world’s largest radio dishes: the Lovell Telescope. This candidate lens is perfect for a radio observation – which can tell us more about its mass and position in space – and I’m excited to say that the giant dish is observing the target as I write!

Space Warps has been a huge success over the past three days and the project continues! Every classification on Space Warps helps our computers understand the whole data set, and so in a way all the objects discovered on Space Warps are the result of everybody’s combined work. You can keep up to date with news from Space Warp via the project’s blog, Twitter and Facebook sites.

A huge thank you to the BBC crew, the Jodrell Bank team, the Space Warps scientists, developers and moderators, and to everyone that took part this week. Keep clicking!

News

Space Warps for BBC Stargazing Live

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This week is the BBC’s Stargazing Live show: three now-annual nights of live stargazing and astronomy chatter, live from Jodrell Bank. In 2012 we asked the Stargazing Live viewers to help us discover a planet with Planet Hunters, in 2013 we explored the surface of Mars with Planet Four. This year we are inviting everybody to use our Space Warps project to discover some of most beautiful and rare objects in the universe: gravitational lenses.

Space Warps launched last year and originally the project asked everyone to spot gravitationally lensed features in optical images from the CFHT Legacy Survey. We’re still busy processing the data but you seem to have found lenses – including the three shown at the top of this post! For Stargazing Live we’re adding a whole new dataset of infrared images, which has not been deeply searched for lenses before. We’re also now working with ’targeted’ data. This means that we are only showing images containing objects in them that could either be lenses, or would be interesting if they were being lensed. So your odds of finding something amazing have really gone up!

Screenshot of Space Warps

Gravitational lenses occur when a massive galaxy – or cluster of galaxies – pass in front of more distant objects. The enormous mass of the (relatively) closer object literally bend light around them and distort the image of the distant source. Imagine holding up a magnifying glass and waving it around the night sky so that starlight is bent and warped by the lens. You can see more about this here on the ESO website.

We’re blogging right now from Jodrell Bank (the dish is looking lovely BTW) and the Stargazing Live set and everyone here is buzzing with the idea that we might find some gravitational lenses that have never been seen before! Good luck, and happy classifying. Even K9 is excited.

News

Season of Giving

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Screenshot 2013-12-21 21.32.07

Yesterday – or today depending on your timezone – Google featured the Zooniverse as part of their One Today app in the USA. This is a fantastic chance to spread to word about the Zooniverse and to give people the chance to donate directly to help make it better. You can also see us on Google’s amazing 12 Days of Giving website.

Regardless of where you are in the world, we think that the best thing most of you can give us is your time. So we’ve created giving.zooniverse.org which you can use to tell the world (or your social network at least) that you’re giving some of your time to the Zooniverse this holiday season. Perhaps you can help spread some citizen science cheer – or just show off that you’re an awesome contributor to science online.

Happy holidays, Merry Christmas, Nadolig Llawen – or whatever you say at this time of year!

News

Zooniverse Cocktails (Part Two)

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Have a drink on the Zooniverse this festive season. Last year we created  a list of festive Zooniverse cocktails for the grown-ups amongst you. Here are a few more, courtesy of our very own Chris Lintott.

Planet 4 Margarita

This is a recipe passed onto me from the Mars Phoenix team, who were looking for two of its components – salt and ice – in the Martian arctic, a region not dissimilar to that explored by Planet 4 volunteers. It’s a nice twist on a classic margarita.

  • 2 cups tequila (a cup is a strange American unit. I use ‘some’ tequila)
  • 1-2 hot chillies, preferably habaneros
  • Salt
  • 6 cups pink grapefruit juice

Half the chillies and mix with the tequila. Allow to stand for the amount of time you can stand it, but at least a few hours. (The longer you leave it, the spicier the tequila). THROW THE CHILLIES OUT.

Dip the rims of the glasses into a little of the juice, then roll in the salt. Shake tequila and grapefruit juice in a 1:3 ratio with plenty of ice and serve in salted glasses. Drink until the rushing onset of winter brings with it an icy tomb. (Actually, that last bit might only apply to Phoenix itself)

PH1b

  • 2 shots Scotch – I like a nice smokey Islay blend like Black Bottle.
  • 1/2 shot sweet vermouth
  • 1/2 shot dry vermouth
  • Dash Angostura bitters
  • Cherry

This is a perfect Rob Roy, but we’ve renamed this classic in honour of our planet with four stars, PH1b. The four liquid ingredients represent the four stars, so shake all of them together and serve in a Martini glass, adding the cherry to represent the planet. This cocktail is not to scale.

Galaxy Zoo Treacle

Becky Smethurst, our new(isn) Galaxy Zoo PhD student in Oxford, loves rum, so this is in honour of her first term in the Zooniverse. As with spiral galaxies, the direction of stirring is essential.

  • 2 shots Rum – preferably dark Jamacian rum
  • 1/4 shot Sugar syrup (you can make this by dissolving lots of sugar in water – typically 1 water : 2 sugar)
  • 1/2 shot apple juice
  • 2 dash Angostura bitters

Put two ice cubes in a glass and stir in the sugar syrup and the bitters. Stir clockwise. Add 1 shot rum, with two more ice cubes, and stir anti clockwise. Add the rest of the rum, two more ice cubes, stir clockwise. Pour apple juice into the top and sip gently.

The Layered Giraffe

In honour of Snapshot Serengeti, this was suggested by Zooniverse volunteer Emma Price.

  • 1 shot Baileys
  • 1 shot Amaretto
  • 1 shot Kahlua

Pour each shot carefully into a glass, then shake cocoa powder on top in a suitably giraffey pattern. (Note this cocktail uses three of my four least favourite ingredients, so I haven’t tried it myself. Let me know how it goes).

The GitHub Gimlet

As many of you know, we lost our Technical Lead Arfon Smith to GitHub earlier this year. I’m pleased to see he’s working hard in his new role, contributing this gin gimlet recipe to an open source cocktail repository :

https://github.com/balevine/cocktails/pull/2/files

To make it a GitHub gimlet, add one single, solitary tear shed at our lost of Arfon and shake viciously.

News

New Project: Radio Galaxy Zoo

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Seasons greetings everyone! Since you’ve been so good this year we have a very special present for you… a brand new project: Radio Galaxy Zoo. We need you to help us discover black holes.

radiogzavatar

Earlier this year, Galaxy Zoo expanded to include the infrared. Now Radio Galaxy Zoo involves looking at galaxies in yet another light. This time we are asking you to match huge jets – seen in radio emission – to the supermassive black holes at the centre of the galaxy that produced them. This requires looking at the galaxies in infrared and radio wavelengths. These galaxies are nothing like our own, and your classifications will allow scientists to understand the causes of these erupting black holes and how they affect the galaxy surrounding them.

Get involved now at http://radio.galaxyzoo.org – and have fun discovering black holes in our Universe.

News, Science

Google confirms that the Zooniverse is awesome!

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The Zooniverse is extremely pleased to announce that it has been named as one of six Google Global Impact Awardees announced in December 2013. The awards are given by Google to projects that show three key elements:
  • technology or innovative approach that can deliver transformational impact
  • a specific project that tests a big game-changing idea
  • a brilliant team with a healthy disregard for the impossible

The grant we have received from Google as part of their Global Impact Award program will allow us to build a platform that can support hundreds or maybe even thousands of new and exciting citizen science projects. A list of the awardees can be seen at the Google Global Impact Award site here http://www.google.com/giving/global-impact-awards/

It means a lot to us at the Zooniverse to have been given this award and we could not have managed it without you, our volunteers. The time and effort you dedicate to our projects shows the world how important citizen science can be, and we’re looking forward to the next few years.

So thanks to you, and thanks to Google!

The Zooniverse team

PS: Just to be clear, this is a philanthropic act from Google – we’ll continue to be an academic project run by the team at Oxford, Adler Planetarium and elsewhere and all your data remains with the Zooniverse as before. Nothing changes, except our ability to scale!

News

A Brand New Milky Way Project

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The Milky Way Project (MWP) is complete. It took about three years and 50,000 volunteers have trawled all our images multiple times and drawn more than 1,000,000 bubbles and several million other objects, including star clusters, green knots, and galaxies. We have produced several papers already and more are on the way. It’s been a huge success but: there’s even more data!

And so it is with glee that we announce the brand new Milky Way Project! It’s got more data, more objects to find, and it’s even more gorgeous.

The new MWP is being launched to include data from different regions of the galaxy in a new infrared wavelength combination. The new data consists of Spitzer/IRAC images from two surveys: Vela-Carina, which is essentially an extension of GLIMPSE covering Galactic longitudes 255°–295°, and GLIMPSE 3D, which extends GLIMPSE 1+2 to higher Galactic latitudes (at selected longitudes only). The images combine 3.6, 4.5, and 8.0 µm in the “classic” Spitzer/IRAC color scheme.  There are roughly 40,000 images to go through.

An EGO shines below a bright star cluster
An EGO shines below a bright star cluster

The latest Zooniverse technology and design is being brought to bear on this big data problem. We are using our newest features to retire images with nothing in them (as determined by the volunteers of course) and to give more screen time to those parts of the galaxy where there are lots of pillars, bubbles and clusters – as well as other things. We’re marking more objects –  bow shocks, pillars, EGOs  – and getting rid of some older ones that either aren’t visible in the new data or weren’t as scientifically useful as we’d hoped (specifically: red fuzzies and green knots).

Screenshot 2013-12-11 21.46.46

We’ve also upgraded to the newest version of Talk, and have kept all your original comments so you can still see the previous data and the objects that were found there. The new Milky Way Project is teeming with more galaxies, stars clusters and unknown objects than the original MWP.

It’s very exciting! There are tens of thousands of images from the Spitzer Space Telescope to look through. By telling us what you see in this infrared data, we can better understand how stars form. Dive in now and start classifying at www.milkywayproject.org – we need your help to map and measure our galaxy.

Fun, News

Rob and Grant are running out of ideas for the Advent Calendar

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Hey everyone, for today’s advent calendar Rob and I made this short video talking about the various ways in which you can take part in the Zooniverse, and the multiple means by which you can keep up-to-date with what we’re doing.

https://vimeo.com/81544627

It also serves as an introduction for me, the new Zooniverse community manager. It is a bit silly at points, and we did it in one take with no script, so apologies for the rough feel!

Here are some of the links I mention in the video:

– Zooniverse on Facebook

– Zooniverse on Twitter

– Daily Zooniverse

Merry Christmas one and all!

News, Science

Andromeda Project We Hardly Knew Ye

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This time last year we launched the Andromeda Project. The aim was the get everyone’s help in locating the star clusters in the Andromeda Galaxy, our next-door neighbour in intergalactic space. The project went better than we could have imagined, and just over two weeks later we had completed more than 1,000,000 classifications and the project’s science team were busy wrangling data.

Cliff at AAS

In fact, in January Cliff Johnson took a poster to one of the world’s biggest astronomy meetings – the January meeting of the AAS – and presented the results from the Andromeda Project, which had only launched 6 weeks prior. It was an amazing example of the power of citizen science to help researchers accomplish the kind of data analysis that computers cannot do reliably.

We decided to do a second round of the Andromeda Project to complete the job we’d started, using both the data that remained in the archive and also new data that was only just being taken last year when the project launched. So in October 2013 (just two months ago) we once again invited the Zooniverse community to come and find star clusters and galaxies. They once again astounded us by gobbling up the data even faster – ably assisted by a trench of new users brought to the project from Facebook’s popular I F***king Love Science page. In a week the job was done.

The science team have already begun processing the data from this second round and the results are amazing. In fact: they’re right here just for you, just because it’s nearly Christmas and just because we wanted to give you a present. So here they are: the first maps of all the star clusters and galaxies in the data from the PHAT survey of Andromeda. Marked and classified by  the wonderful Andromeda Project community.

AP Map
Clusters are in blue, galaxies in red. The background image is single-band F475W data showing the galaxy itself.

You can see how the background galaxies are best seen at the outer edges (because we are looking through less material), and the clusters are found predominately in the spiral arms (where more star formation is happening). These plots will form part of the publications the science team and currently working on, and which will most likely appear on the Zooniverse Publications page sometime in 2014. Follow along on the blog, Twitter and Facebook for updates from the science team in the coming weeks and months.

Congratulations to everyone who helped out and gave their time to the Andromeda Project: you were amazing!

So as much as I’d like to wish the Andromeda Project a happy birthday, it seems like I should really wish it a happy retirement. Luckily we have more space-based projects coming soon to the Zooniverse – so the community will have plenty to get along with. However, the Andromeda Project will always have a special place in our hearts for its efficient and dedicated volunteers. Who knows, maybe one day it will come out of retirement for one last hurrah? We can only hope.

Andromeda Project, we hardly knew ye.