As one of the latest results of the "Galaxy Zoo Project" citizen science project, we have just observed an extraordinary galaxy through the Hubble Space Telescope of the United States (NASA)/European Space Agency (ESA). SCI Tech Daily pointed out - CGCG 396-2 is an unusual multi-arm merger galaxy located in Orion about 520 million light years away from the Earth.
Galaxy CGCG 396-2 (from: NASA / ESA Hubble)
It is reported that the Galaxy Zoo project has attracted hundreds of thousands of volunteers to classify galaxies, aiming to help astronomers solve such a problem-how to capture the huge amount of images taken by the machine Observation data are classified.
After public voting, Galaxy Zoo selected some representative celestial objects for subsequent observations by the Hubble Telescope. CGCG 396-2, described in this article, is also one of the candidates and was imaged by Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys.
As for the origins of the Galaxy Zoo project, it is said that an astronomer took on the rather tricky task of cataloging more than 900,000 galaxies with the naked eye.
The good news is that the collaborative Galaxy Zoo project has been incredibly successful by distributing the work online and inviting citizen scientists to actively contribute to the challenge.
In just six months, an astronomy team of 100,000 volunteers contributed more than 40 million galaxy classifications to the massive database.
Since its initial success, Galaxy Zoo and its subsequent projects have spawned more than a hundred peer-reviewed scientific research papers and produced a rich variety of interesting astronomical discoveries beyond the original goals.
It is worth mentioning that the success of this project has also inspired 100+ citizen science projects on the Zooniverse portal - from analyzing the 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko comet visited by ESA's Rosetta spacecraft to calculating the temperature around remote Alaskan islands. killer whale .
