Happy 3rd birthday Radio Galaxy Zoo!

In 2016, you have all contributed to more than 16 years of continuous classification and our project is now two-thirds of its way to completion and what a year it has been!

The biggest science news coming out of Radio Galaxy Zoo this year will have to be the official publication of the Matorny-Terentev cluster of galaxies, (RGZ-CL J0823.2+0333) –named after two of our super-Zooites who discovered the Giant Wide-Angle Tail galaxy (shown in white contours to the left, Banfield et al 2016).   We have also made great progress across several RadioTalk projects such as the Giants, the Spiral-DRAGNs, the Green DRAGNs and the HyMoRS.    Therefore, we will be providing more detailed updates from the team leaders in the coming weeks so please stay tuned for more exciting Radio Galaxy Zoo science highlights from 2016.

Our science team has also been evolving and this year, we bade farewell to Kyle W. and Chris S. who are pursuing new adventures and we sincerely thank them for all the fish.  We also saw the arrival and departure of Tim F., our ANU outreach student who worked with Julie and we hope that you have enjoyed his blog posts earlier this year.

This year, the RGZ science team welcomes Meg Schwamb from Gemini Observatory (who helped with the Chinese translation of RGZ) and Jean Tate, the first RGZ citizen scientist to become an associate member of the RGZ science team.  Meg will be helping us with the upcoming RGZ follow-up observations using the Gemini telescope.

We also have a new student joining our team and working with Julie in the coming year. Meet James L.,  a PhD Candidate in Science Communication at the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science. He completed his Bachelor of Science (Hons) in 2015 at the Australian National University with a double major in Astronomy/Astrophysics and Science Communication.  I am sure that you’ll hear more from James himself in the coming year.

Thank you all very much for your support again. We are most grateful for your help thus far. To finish the remaining third of the project, we seek your help in the coming days, months & year to complete this monumental task.

We wish you all a wonderful holiday period and a great upcoming year!

Cheers,

Ivy, Julie & RGZ team