Adler Planetarium wants your help mapping galaxy mergers
If you happen to be an amateur astronomer or have always had your greatest moments when looking at the sky then you may have an online website that could be your favorite spot on the web.
The Adler Planetarium working together with GalaxyZoo. org is looking for people who can donate their time to help trace the origins of the universe. Currently, they have registered 10,000 volunteers who are able to give their time to help them by simply looking at the stars.
The professional star gazers at the Adler Planetarium have teamed up with Galaxy Zoo in order to solve a universal mystery and there are many mysteries in the universe. Their current project is to understand and to find galaxy mergers. These galaxy mergers will let them uncover the secrets of the evolution of the universe. They are therefore recruiting people to map possible galaxy mergers. Since the universe is huge, they need a lot of people who can donate their time to helping them in their task.
- Galaxy Merger? Or Not?
All amateur astronomers and even astrologers as well as online people who like looking at the stars are asked to log-in to GalaxyZoo.org. The online website has images of virtual collisions and the object of the search is to match a virtual collision with a real collision. Some online users might wonder why a computer is not used to do the searching.
The scientists believe that that humans are more capable of spotting similarities from the virtual collisions than computers. This current project of uncovering the secrets of the Universe is just another project in a long line of projects in the works. Their website, GalaxyZoo, was started two years ago by astronomers who decided that ordinary people not trained in knowing what to look for might like looking at pictures of galaxies and their are thousands to look through of the galaxies.
The project of using common people to look at images of the universe and the colliding galaxies has already proven to be successful. Important discoveries in finding supernovae and in listing galaxies according to their physical representations have already been reported.
In 2009, a collection of bright green galaxies were found and were named “Green Peas” . Seems that these galaxies have unique colors as well as measurable size. Two years ago, in 2007, what looked like a distant trace of what could have been a black hole was surprisingly spotted by a teacher in Holland.
All star gazers are encouraged to visit mergers.galaxyzoo. org to begin their new hobby of looking for images that match the real thing. The project is obviously going to take a long time and your new hobby should give your hours of dedicated enjoyment. This site sounds like a good jumping off point to astrologers who do that mapping of the universe with individual people already. The site is a great place to begin if you have an interest in Astrology or if you are just wishing to try your hand at being an astronomer as well as an astrologer.