Let's All Play the Cosmic Slot Machine!

Earlier this year I blogged about Galaxy Zoo 2, an updated version of the original Galaxy Zoo project that launched on February 17th. From that post:

The original Galaxy Zoo asked members of the public to access galleries of galactic images to help determine whether a given galaxy was a spiral or elliptical, and whether it was rotating. The 2.0 version asked participants to delve a bit deeper and "fill in all the details and create a real Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxies," according to Oxford University's Chris Lintott, one of the project's founders.

Why ask a bunch of amateur enthusiasts to get involved in the first place? I mean, it's not like we have much specialized training. But apparently 'The human brain is still better at doing pattern recognition tasks than a computer." And the response from armchair scientists has been staggering: in the last 18 months, 80 million classifications of galaxies were submitted on one million objects -- the handiwork of a mere 150,000 amateur astronomers all over the world.

Among the types of galaxies identified by those users -- who now number 250,000 -- were galactic mergers. These sorts of collisions are critical to determining why our cosmos has such a varied mix of galaxy formations. Cue the entrance of Galaxy Zoo 3.0, Galaxy Zoo Mergers, which went live on November 24. Once again, amateur astronomers in the general population are encouraged to go online and mix amd match random images. They can even adapt the simulations themselves to include more or fewer stars, or "flip" galaxies to see if that makes a better match with one of the real images.

Lintott describes this new project as being "rather like a giant slot machine, with a real image of a galactic merger in the center and eight randomly selected simulated merger images filling the other eight 'slots' around it." Those computer simulated images collectively incorporate different variables that come into play when galaxies form. There are literally millions of simulated image possibilities, says Lintott, and it's necessary to filter out the very best matches, all in the name of building up a profile of the components necessary to create the real galaxies dotted about our universe.

Once that's been done, the project will look at "before" and after" Hubble images, searching for evidence of what may have caused them, and find clues to the next phase of the process. It's a bit like reconstructing a slow-motion car crash and using that to predict the wreckage to follow. So check out this online cosmic slot machine. Who knows? You might just hit the scientific jackpot.