Planning for the Future of Galaxy Zoo – Science Team Meeting at ISSI

A large fraction of the Galaxy Zoo Science Team will be gathering at the International Space Science Institute (or ISSI) later this month to discuss the future of Galaxy Zoo, and in particular to work on the next phase of Galaxy Zoo now that there are large numbers of distant galaxies with publicly available JWST images. 

This is part of a series of two funded meeting at ISSI that the Galaxy Zoo team was awarded with the goal of working on the next phases of Galaxy Zoo: JWST. 

As the saying goes, if it isn’t broken don’t fix it. But also Galaxy Zoo has a tradition at being at the forefront of galaxy morphology techniques. So we want to use this meeting as an opportunity to spend some time reassessing the entire method that Galaxy Zoo pioneered back in 2007, when it was still a new idea to invite volunteers to participate in online image analysis.  Our understanding of how to analyze your votes has evolved a lot over the last 17 years and across the more than 70 peer-reviewed publications the team has worked on. The status of machine learning methods for galaxy image analysis has also changed significantly, so it makes sense to reassess the most effective approach for humans and machines to collaborate on understanding the shapes and structures of galaxies. 

The Galaxy Zoo science team has always been really international and distributed, with astronomers based all over the world. We are all really excited that ISSI has provided funding for us to have this rare gathering in person. We hope that by spending a week working together in person we can have some really productive discussions around the future of the project. We also have specific plans to work on getting the JWST images ready for your classifications as well as analyzing the results from the JWST:CEERS images you have already classified using our standard method.

As always we welcome volunteer input, not just via your classifications, but if you have opinions on what you would like to see in future versions of Galaxy Zoo, we invite you to share them on the Talk Forum.