Dear volunteers,

Thanks to you, we’ve found 40,000 new ringed galaxies – about six times more than all the ringed galaxies anyone has ever found before! The Royal Astronomical Society were impressed enough to share the news in a press release here.

I launched the Rings Challenge here on this blog ten months ago, asking for your help searching for galaxies with rings around them. I wasn’t sure if anyone would be interested in using the new mobile project we made. Ten months later, you’ve made a million swipes on 100,000 galaxies. I’m so grateful.

Rings are rare. To help you find them, I created an automatic assistant. I used the first half of your swipes to teach an artificial intelligence algorithm what rings look like. Then I set the algorithm searching a million DESI galaxies to find more rings. Finally, I took the galaxies the AI thought might have rings and asked you to check them with the second half of your swipes. This two step approach let us both search many galaxies quickly and have human eyes vet all of our discoveries.

This is the first major science result from the new GZ Mobile project. Making an app wasn’t part of the original plan – the first iPhone launched three weeks after GZ, 15 years ago this month – but it’s now a crucial tool for hunting specific galaxies quickly. I hope you’ll join us for the next search.

Cheers,

Mike

P.S

You can find more technical details on the machine learning on my personal blog.

P.P.S

Apologies to ChristineM, who many months ago correctly point out that I should technically call them “ringed” galaxies rather than “ring” galaxies.

Firstly, happy 15th birthday to Galaxy Zoo and thank you to all those who have made it a success over the last decade-and-a-half. Whether you’re a regular on Talk, and original classifier, a member of the science team or someone who has been inspired by the project to find out a little more about science, thank you!

Looking back at the BBC article that started everything, I notice we ‘hoped’ that 30000 people would take part in our project. We blew past that target early on, and haven’t looked back since. The results of the project have told us much about galaxy history, inspired novel machine learning approaches to science, helped us build the broader Zooniverse and much more. It still stuns me to think that there’s a Hubble Space Telescope program following up on Galaxy Zoo discoveries, and there is still much more science to come. (It’s not ridiculous to think that JWST, the new space telescope which will release its first image tonight, will soon follow up on a Galaxy Zoo discovery, or provide images for a future version of the project). My failure to anticipate this glorious feature came because we simply underestimated the passion, ability and enthusiasm of all of you to help learn a little bit more about the Universe.

I’m also very proud of the PhD students who have worked with the Galaxy Zoo team to make use of our data, and help lead the project. Several generations have now successfully graduated, and there’s much more to come from the current cohort. Since September, the project has been led by the immensely impressive Karen Masters, who has taken over from me as Principal Investigator, with assistance from Brooke Simmons (Deputy PI), Sandor Kruk (Project Scientist), Becky Smethurst (Deputy Project Scientist), and Mike Walmsley (Technical Lead). With them the project is in excellent hands, and I’m looking forward to the next decade-or-so of galaxy science, powered by you, the wonderful denizens of the Zoo.