Astronomical Discoveries

Help Classify Galaxies Seen by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope!

Mahmuda Islam1 year ago1 year ago6225 mins

The Galaxy Zoo classification interface shows you an image from NASA’s Webb telescope
and asks you questions about it.
Image credit: Galaxy Zoo, Zooniverse. Inset galaxy: NASA/STScI/CEERS/TACC/S.
Finkelstein/M. Bagley/Z. Levay/A. Pagan

NASA needs your help identifying the shapes of thousands
of galaxies in images taken by our James Webb Space
Telescope with the Galaxy Zoo project. These
classifications will help scientists answer questions about
how the shapes of galaxies have changed over time, what
caused these changes, and why. Thanks to the light
collecting power of Webb, there are now over 500,000
images of galaxies on website of the Galaxy Zoo citizen
science project—more images than scientists can classify
by themselves.
“This is a great opportunity to see images from the newest
space telescope,” said volunteer Christine Macmillan from
Aberdeen, Scotland. “Galaxies at the edge of our universe
are being seen for the first time, just as they are starting to
form. Just sign up and answer simple questions about the
shape of the galaxy that you are seeing. Anyone can do it,
ages 10 and up!”
As we look at more distant objects in the universe, we see
them as they were billions of years ago because light
takes time to travel to us. With Webb, we can spot
galaxies at greater distances than ever before. We’re
seeing what some of the earliest galaxies ever detected
look like, for the first time. The shapes of these galaxies
tell us about how they were born, how and when they
formed stars, and how they interacted with their
neighbors. By looking at how more distant galaxies have
different shapes than close galaxies, we can work out
which processes were more common at different times in
the universe’s history.
At Galaxy Zoo, you’ll first examine an image from the Webb
telescope. Then you will be asked several questions, such
as ‘Is the galaxy round?’, or ‘Are there signs of spiral
arms?’. If you’re quick, you may even be the first person
to see the galaxies you’re asked to classify.
“I’m amazed and honored to be one of the first people to
actually see these images! What a privilege!” said
volunteer Elisabeth Baeten from Leuven, Belgium.
Galaxy Zoo is a citizen science project with a long history
of scientific impact. Galaxy Zoo volunteers have been
exploring deep space since July 2007, starting with a
million galaxies from a telescope in New Mexico called the
Sloan Digital Sky Survey and then, moving on to images
from space telescopes like NASA’s Hubble Space
Telescope and ESA (European Space Agency)’s Euclid
telescope. The project has revealed spectacular mergers,
taught us about how the black holes at the center of
galaxies affect their hosts, and provided insight into how
features like spiral arms form and grow.
Now, in addition to adding new data from Webb, the
science team has incorporated an AI algorithm called
ZooBot, which will sift through the images first and label
the ‘easier ones’ where there are many examples that
already exist in previous images from the Hubble Space
Telescope. When ZooBot is not confident on the
classification of a galaxy, perhaps due to complex or faint
structures, it will show it to users on Galaxy Zoo to get
their human classifications, which will then help ZooBot
learn more. Working together, humans and AI can
accurately classify limitless numbers of galaxies. The
Galaxy Zoo science team acknowledges support from the
International Space Sciences Institute (ISSI), who
provided funding for the team to get together and work on
Galaxy Zoo. Join the project now.