A Galaxy Walks Into A Bar…

We are pleased to announce that a Galaxy Zoo project is one of the first projects built on the new Zooniverse! Several years ago we measured the lengths of galactic bars in relatively nearby galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and Ben Hoyle wrote an excellent paper presenting new an interesting results on how bars, which are a distinct feature caused by a change in the nature of the orbits of some of the stars in a galaxy, relate to other physical properties of the galaxy, such as color (indicative of recent star formation) and the nature of spiral arms or rings. That work showed the power of measurements like these, which are not always easy for computers to get right.

Today, we’re hoping you’ll help us extend that set of detailed galaxy measurements into the distant Universe, with measurements of bars in about 8,000 galaxies from our previous projects using Hubble Space Telescope data, including the AEGIS, CANDELS, COSMOS, GEMS and GOODS surveys.

We’ve deliberately been pretty broad in our selection of galaxies which may have a bar, so the first thing the project asks you is to confirm whether you think the galaxy does indeed have one. There are many examples of barred and not-barred galaxies (including examples of sort-of-looks-like-barred-but-actually-isn’t-and-here’s-why) included in the project, and you can access them anytime by clicking the “Need some help?” button.

We’ve also zoomed in on the central galaxy to make it easier to classify.

If the galaxy doesn’t have a bar, then you can move on to the next one. If it does, there are some follow-up questions about spiral arms and rings, and then we ask you to draw 2 lines on the image: one for the bar width and one for its length.

You can also join in the discussions after the classifications with our new Talk discussion tool, which is completely separate from the main Galaxy Zoo Talk (just like the rest of the project).

On a more personal note, this is a big step forward for the Zooniverse as a whole. The first draft version of this project came together in under 1 hour back in April. Afterward, we shared project links between science team members and iterated back and forth on the right questions to ask and the right data to use. This process would normally take at least 6 months and require a lot of one-on-one time with a Zooniverse developer. Instead, because the Zooniverse development team has done a brilliant job creating a Project Builder that’s flexible, powerful and also easy to use, we were able to create a new project in a way that’s analogous to, well, creating a blog.

In these early days of the new site’s release I’m sure there will be some bugs that need zapping, but even so the new capabilities of the Zooniverse are phenomenal. I suspect this is just the first of many new projects to be spun up in the New Zooniverse. (In fact, there are 3 more projects debuting alongside ours.)

Try it out here: Galaxy Zoo: Bar Lengths