Science in the public eye
I’ve written a long piece on my personal blog about trying to do science when you’re a project as public as Galaxy Zoo is. It’s my opinion rather than the team’s, so I’ll leave it there but if you’re interested take a look and comment over there.
Chris
The Ghost of a Black Hole: Hanny's Voorwerp in the News
One of the most exciting results of Galaxy Zoo is that of the mysterious ‘Voorwerp’ (Dutch for ‘object’) discovered by Hanny van Arkel. She posted about a strange blob on our forum and we have been hooked by it ever since. The Voorwerp has hit the news this week as we’re starting to understand just what it is. We’re collecting some of the news coverage here:
- Oxford and Yale press releases. You can also listen to this podcast [mp3].
- English: BBC, CNN, New Scientist, Nature, Reuters
- Dutch: Elsevier, De Volkskrant
- German: Der Spiegel.
We will update this as we find more. Hanny is also maintaining a much more detailed list on the forum.
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UPDATE: Hanny made the headline on CNN
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UPDATE: We made it to NPR Science Friday. Click here to download the mp3.
Galaxy Zoo Paper update
With so many fabulous results working their way through the system, you’d be forgiven for losing track of exactly what’s happening with the Galaxy Zoo papers, so I thought a quick update was in order.First of all, the 5th Galaxy Zoo paper has been submitted, presenting the initial results of our study of Hanny’s Voorwerp; one simple question on the forum has led to a paper with 19 authors, from 14 different institutions. 
We’ve already had a first response from the referee, who told us that we needed to be more careful with some of the results we were reporting; we’ve corrected our missteps, and it’ll go back to the journal today. We also had a referee’s response to Steven’s paper, and will let you know more when we can.Various other papers are in the works; in the last week or so I’ve spent a lot of time arguing over the mergers sample, taking a closer look at rings and having my first look at Anze’s work on rotating spirals. Plenty more work to do, and plenty more news to tell you about as we continue to make the most of all your hard work.Chris
Old GZ Forum – Data Update
As many of you are aware, over the past 9 weeks I have been trying to retrieve some of the old Galaxy Zoo Forum data that was lost at the beginning of June. A massive outage at ThePlanet.com TX, USA, where the Forum was previoulsy hosted, caused damage to the web server HDD and has resulted in us trying to restore the missing forum backup content using Data Recovery Services in California. Unforunately the chances of restoring this data would now appear to be remote.
I have been in constant contact with ThePlanet.com and their most recent report stated that “despite strenuous efforts to recover the data from the damaged HDD, so far very little has been salvaged. They are continuing to extract what they can, but realistically there is very little chance of finding anything usable.”
It is pretty disappointing news, especially since the data loss was outside our control, but hopefully it has resulted in only minimal inconvenience for our amazing army of forum zooites!. I will keep you updated via the Galaxy Zoo Blog as soon as more information is available. Thankfully, Edd managed to get the Galaxy Zoo Forum back running again a few weeks ago and it seems to be continuing to to grow ever bigger.
Philip Murray
Galaxy Zoo Team & Fingerprint Digital Media
Want to work for Galaxy Zoo?
If you happen to have a PhD – in any subject – and would like to help us continue the Galaxy Zoo adventure, then there’s a job advert on the Oxford Physics site that might interest you.
Google helps out Galaxy Zoo
As this story announced on Thursday, Galaxy Zoo has been given a grant of $50,000 by Google. As Bob says “The Google grant will enable us to add two key features to Galaxy Zoo. We will incorporate ‘GoogleSky’ technology into the website so it resembles the Google Maps interface. Then we will put Galaxy Zoo into the Google Sky and Google Citations Pros interface which will allow people to zoom around the universe, click on any galaxy and classify it more easily.”
It’ll take us a while to get there but this should make classifying a lot more fun, and hopefully allow us to do all sorts of exciting things.
eGZeLENS — The extensive Galaxy Zoo LENsing Survey
We’ve go exciting news; Galaxy Zoo has gotten time on our largest telescope
yet, the enormous 8m Gemini South telescope…
Hi there
Some of you may have had some interaction with me on the GalaxyZoo Forum on the topic of Gravitational Lenses. My name is Aprajita Verma and I am a researcher at the University of Oxford. I primarily work on galaxies at high redshift trying to understand their nature as we see them, how they began their lives and postulating about their fate.
The State of the Zoo
I was going to write another history post about the early days of the zoo to mark today’s anniversary. After all, it was around now – 9.30am – on July 11th that I realised just what we’d done, as our server went down under the pressure and email after email after email arrived in our inbox complaining about it – or helpfully pointing out that we had technical problems. For someone who thought that this project might be a spare time occupation it was a rude awakening and the story of the last year has in some sense been a struggle to catch up.
Beta-Testing Zoo 2
The serenity of the dreaming spires was somewhat shattered in the Denys Wilkinson building where Chris and Kevin work. Chris’s phone rings randomly when nobody’s calling him, I was defeated in a fight with the coffee machine, and the spirit of headless chickens prevails! The walls, nonetheless, are lined with galaxy pictures. The offices’ doors and walls are mostly made of glass; Chris’s looks like a greenhouse whose plants are books and papers and Post-It notes, and on one of his walls is a nearly-empty bottle of gin, professionally upside down like you get in a bar. Kate used to sit on the right, and Kevin’s office is two doors down. I was pleased to meet Ciaran, the work experience student who wrote our ring galaxies post, and to watch Chris drawing some scary formulae for him on the whiteboard which is part of his office door.
Credit: Neha
Galaxy Zoo 