Happy Birthday (& a belated announcement)

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.