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UID:UW-Physics-Event-2166
DTSTART:20110413T223000Z
DTEND:20110413T233000Z
DTSTAMP:20260419T142928Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20110411T174956Z
LOCATION:Wisconsin Institute for Discovery Town Center
SUMMARY:The Birth of the Zooniverse: How Citizen Scientists are Taking
  On Research from Galaxies to Climate Change\, Public Lecture at Wisco
 nsin Institute for Discovery\, Lucy Fortson\, Associate Professor UMN 
 Physics
DESCRIPTION:Imagine that you are an astronomer and you have a goldmine
  of data - one million galaxies digitally imaged by the Sloan Digital 
 Sky Survey\, the first-ever digital survey of the heavens. In amongst 
 these galaxies are beautiful grand design spirals with blue knots of s
 tar formation regions beaded into the graceful spiral arms. There are 
 also giant elliptical galaxies that are mostly red as their star forma
 tion died out ages ago leaving the glowing embers of a population of o
 lder stars. As an astronomer\, you know that there are still many unan
 swered questions about why this dichotomy between blue spirals and red
  ellipticals exists and how galaxies evolved to be this way from the B
 ig Bang. One question you might ask yourself is whether\, hidden among
 st these million galaxies\, are images of blue ellipticals or red spir
 als. That is\, are there elliptical galaxies that still have enough st
 ar formation occurring within their vast reaches to appear significant
 ly blue to our digital instruments\; or are there spiral galaxies wher
 e for some unknown reason\, all the stars are from an older generation
  of stars and thus appear red? Now\, what if you were told that no com
 puter code could be written to find these blue ellipticals or red spir
 als because the shapes were too complex for a computer to decipher? Th
 at the only way to solve this problem was to look at each of the milli
 on galaxies by eye and classify them one-by-one? This is the problem t
 hat was presented to a graduate student at Oxford University in 2006 a
 nd his solution to the problem resulted in the birth of the now-famous
  Galaxy Zoo project.  Galaxy Zoo asked the general public to volunteer
  their time and their visual cortex to look at the images of these mil
 lion galaxies through an online interface. No astronomy training was r
 equired or wanted - just the pattern matching skills at which humans a
 re so good and computers so terrible. Galaxy Zoo was a tremendous succ
 ess with more than 100\,000 volunteers providing over 60 million class
 ifications leading to over 20 papers published in scientific journals.
  Based on this success\, the Galaxy Zoo team developed several more pr
 ojects where this `citizen science' method of data processing could be
  applied. And thus the `Zooniverse' was born.  In this presentation\, 
 Dr. Fortson will overview the Galaxy Zoo project\, describing the meth
 od of citizen science data processing and how this method eventually m
 arries humans with computers to gain the most knowledge out of the hug
 e flood of digital data that continues to pour in across all disciplin
 es. Along the way\, she will talk about some of the discoveries made b
 y the general public and demonstrate several of the current projects a
 vailable to the more than 400\,000 volunteers in the Zooniverse.
URL:https://www.physics.wisc.edu/events/?id=2166
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