Almost 1 Million Classifications on GZ JWST! 🎉
We’re thrilled to share that Galaxy Zoo volunteers are about to reach an incredible milestone: 1,000,000 classifications on GZ JWST!
GZ JWST first launched back in April 2025 with over 300,000 galaxies from the COSMOS-Web survey. In the 200 days since, you have worked through this remarkable dataset at an extraordinary pace, helping us trace how galaxy structures change over cosmic time. Thanks to your classifications, we’re gaining a clearer picture of what galaxies looked like in the early Universe and how their shapes evolved into the systems we see around us today.
Galaxy Zoo has always been powered by the curiosity and dedication of its volunteers. Thank you for donating your time, your attention, and your enthusiasm.
Highlights from Talk
As we celebrate this milestone together, it’s worth taking a moment to look at some of the excitement happening on Talk. These are the top five most-discussed galaxies from this survey, with the images below counting down from #5. Each image links to its Notes page, so check it out and join in.
You can find many more stunning galaxies on Talk. For example, the JWST Gems tag highlights some of the most striking objects volunteers have come across. As always, thank you for making Talk such a joy to explore — it’s a pleasure to see what you all discover. And thank you for helping us (almost) reach one million classifications on GZ JWST! We can’t wait to see what you’ll uncover in the next million. 🎉
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.
Take a Peek at Some JWST Images
Many different teams of scientists are using NASA’s latest space telescope, JWST, to image galaxies so far away that they are back at the earliest time galaxies appear in the Universe. Because these galaxies are quite a bit more distant than any we’ve classified before in Galaxy Zoo, we want to make sure we know how to ask the right questions about the shapes and types of galaxies present, and also make sure we get the image processing as good as possible before asking for your help classifying lots of them.
To get Galaxy Zoo started on classifying (we hope eventually) all of the distant galaxies in JWST imaging, we are running a pilot with just 8000 galaxy images from the Cosmic Evolution Early Research Science (CEERS) survey.
CEERS is using JWST to take extremely deep images of 100 sq. arcmin of the sky (which is about 1/8th the size of the Full Moon!). It is making use of JWST instruments called NIRCam, MIRI, and NIRSpec to obtain both images and spectra in this patch of sky. CEERS’ main goal is to demonstrate, test, and validate efficient extragalactic surveys with coordinated, overlapping parallel observations in a patch of sky which already has a lot of other multi-wavelength data (e.g. from the Hubble Space Telescope).
Even though the pilot sample is being put into Galaxy Zoo mainly as a test survey for future projects, we still expect that your classifications of these images will help us find out a lot about the type and number of galaxies at very high redshifts (z~9-13), look for early star formation, black hole growth and the assembly of bulges and discs in galaxies at z>3, and look for dust observed star formation and black hole growth at z~1-3. We also plan to see how well machine classifiers like Zoobot do at classifying these galaxies, so we can get them to help with the classification of future, larger collections of JWST galaxies.
These images are from the first CEERS public data release. We have coordinated with the CEERS team to make sure the images you see are optimized to bring out as much detail as possible, and that the questions we are asking will enable the best possible science. We hope you’ll enjoy seeing some of the most distant galaxies ever observed in the project. And, as always, thanks for all your hard work classifying. We appreciate every click you provide.
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