Our SEVEN Favourites

To honour the SEVENTH anniversary of Galaxy Zoo (July 11th) we’ve put together a gallery of the Science Team’s favourite images from the site (and why) for your visual pleasure…

Chris’s favourite: I love the flocculent spiral galaxies. The ones you can stare at and still have no idea how many spiral arms they have.

Karen’s favourite: I’m a sucker for merging galaxies, despite the fact that I work on barred galaxies mainly! This one which looks like the yin-yang symbol (or maybe a heart) is a particular favourite. It’s amazing that the Universe can be so vast that we can find galaxies in so many different shapes. 

Kevin’s favourite: The penguin galaxy shows the power of human pattern recognition – and a crucial stage in galaxy evolution!

Brooke’s favourite: when the latest Galaxy Zoo launched, the volunteers made a find almost right away that turned out to be a very rare kind of object called a gravitational lens. I love this image because it shows not just the variety of things that are out there in the Universe — in this case the very distant universe — but also the rare place that Galaxy Zoo itself occupies. It’s a diverse community and diverse images like this are part of the reason why.

Kyle’s favourite: did you know that we can spell Galaxy Zoo out of galaxies? The users originally started collecting a list of galaxies that look like letters and now we have writing.galaxyzoo.org thanks to Steven. Since it’s the anniversary, here’s my favourite letter G.

Bill’s favourite: Hanny’s Voørwerp really started something – the blue stuff in the image – other teams are now finding similar objects at smaller and larger distances too. 

Becky’s favourite: this amazing image has SO much going on in it – mergers, interactions, spirals, bars, ellipticals, grand designs, foreground stars etc. It feels like a visual representation of thoughts in my head at times, which is clearly why I love it.

BONUS:

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field!!!! Just to remind us all why we’re all here. Every single thing you can see in this image is a galaxy – even the most minuscule of dots. And the size of the image on the sky is about 1/20 the size of the Full Moon… Let’s just all take a minute to let that sink in as we stare and wonder...