Return of Galaxy Zoo Mobile

Galaxy Zoo Mobile is back! 

This time, we have two challenges for you; understanding rings and finding gravitational lenses. Both can be accessed through the Galaxy Zoo Mobile project on the Zooniverse app. Dive in and start swiping! 

Get the Zooniverse app on Android iOS and find Galaxy Zoo under ‘All Projects’ or ‘Space’. You can also use your browser if you prefer.

Understanding Rings

You already helped us find ringed galaxies; galaxies with a ring of stars around them. But there are many ways to “have a ring”; detached rings, pseudo rings and winding rings to name a few! Help us divide the ringed galaxies you found into all these different types. 

We’re also on the lookout for anything truly weird, as we know there are bound to be some crazy never-before-seen ring structures out there. The images you will see are the most likely to have rings from a suite of 9 million galaxies – so you’re going to see some truly spectacular shapes and sizes. 

We don’t know how rings work. Help us find out.

Finding Gravitational Lenses

Following on from the success of one of Galaxy Zoo’s latest iterations, Galaxy Zoo: Cosmic Dawn, we want to double-down on identifying all images containing a very rare type of object: gravitational lenses. These are galaxies surrounded by the light of a second galaxy directly behind them, with gravity distorting this light into beautiful arcs and rings. These objects can be used to help shed a light on dark matter and the early Universe, if we can find them!

For some of Galaxy Zoo: Cosmic Dawn, we used AI to help speed up the classification process and let you focus on the most interesting images. But our AI doesn’t understand rare objects like gravitational lenses, many of which may have been missed as a result. So, we ask you to take part in identifying these elusive objects hidden in over 20,000 Hyper-Suprime Cam (HSC) images from the Hawaii Two-0 (H20) Cosmic Dawn survey. Start searching on the Zooniverse app.

Thank you, as always, for your time and support.

James P, (also) James D, and Mike, on behalf of the Galaxy Zoo team