Citizen Scientists Making Incredible Discoveries

Citizen Scientists Making Incredible Discoveries

Zooite Hanny van Arkel, a Dutch schoolteacher, discovered a strange green object floating in her cosmic soup. When van Arkel noticed this unusual greenish object and posted an image of it on the Galaxy Zoo forum, not even the experts knew what it was.2 They named it "Voorwerp," Dutch for "object."

by Dauna Coulter
Science@NASA
Huntsville AL (SPX) Apr 26, 2011
"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known," wrote Carl Sagan. And now you can be the one to find it, thanks to Zooniverse, a unique citizen science website. Zooniverse volunteers, who call themselves "Zooites," are working on a project called Galaxy Zoo, classifying distant galaxies imaged by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.1

"Not only are people better than computers at detecting the subtleties that differentiate galaxies, they can do things computers can't do, like spot things that just look interesting," explains Zooniverse director Chris Lintott, an astronomer at the University of Oxford.

Zooite Hanny van Arkel, a Dutch schoolteacher, discovered a strange green object floating in her cosmic soup. When van Arkel noticed this unusual greenish object and posted an image of it on the Galaxy Zoo forum, not even the experts knew what it was.2 They named it "Voorwerp," Dutch for "object."

Citizen Scientists Making Incredible Discoveries