What this blog is all about…

Greetings, and happy holidays from Galaxy Zoo!We’ve really appreciated all the work you have done in classifying all the galaxies in the Zoo. If you haven’t been around for a while, we’d love it if you returned to the Galaxy Zoo site to classify a few more galaxies. If you haven’t already, please take a look at the Galaxy Zoo forum, where you can talk with fellow classifiers about the Zoo, astronomy, or anything else that strikes your fancy.

This blog is the latest project from the “Zookeepers”- the small but dedicated team that operates the site. Thanks to all of you, we now have a lovely sample of galaxies marked as “elliptical,” “clockwise spiral,” and so on. What we want to do now is to see what your classifications can tell us about the universe we live in. And oh my, are they telling us a lot about our universe. More than we ever imagined – and it seems like every week, we think of a new project we can do with your wonderful classifications.

Since you’re the ones who have done these classifications, it’s only fair that we keep you up to date on what we are doing.Here’s what happening now. We are busy analyzing the classifications in various ways; counting, sorting, measuring, and comparing our measurements to other scientists’. We are working on a number of projects right now. All of us are contributing to every project, but each project has one (sometimes two) people primarily responsible for it.

Soon, we will start communicating our results to other scientists. There are two main ways that scientists communicate with each other: meetings and papers. Meetings are the place to present work in progress and get feedback from other people, and papers are the written records of finished projects.* We will be giving two presentations at the American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting in early January in Austin, Texas, USA. Chris will give a talk focusing on our research reuslts, and I will give a poster presentation on how the public has helped us create these projects. (More on this meeting as it gets closer.)

Along with preparing presentations for this meeting, we are also starting to write the scientific papers on our results.We created this blog to give you a window into the process by which we are conducting our research, and writing our papers. We’ll be doing a new post every Monday and Thursday, in the afternoon GMT (so, afternoons in the U.K. and mornings in the U.S.). We encourage you to leave comments here, and also to head over to the Forum to talk with other people.Coming up this Thursday – Chris will give an orientation of what we are working on, and who is doing what.

*No research project is really ever finished, because it always must be repeated and expanded upon, but papers are the place where results of a single project are recorded.