Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology
News
Universities Tap the Internet To Map the Universe ... One Galaxy at a Time
7/16/2007
You're sitting on a pile of about a million telescopic photos of the universe, and each one needs to be classified. Bit of a job. So what do you do? Astronomers at the University of Portsmouth, Oxford University, and Johns Hopkins University came up with a solution last week that not only alleviated the burden but also generated an enthusiastic response from the public: They opened up the project to volunteers via the Internet.The goal of the project is to identify and classify galaxies all over the universe and create a distribution map of galactic types--primarily spiral versus elliptical, but with some variations as well.
In order to accomplish this, the three universities opened up the project on a website called GalaxyZoo (link below). Users log into the site, then are shown images of galaxies (and other cosmic entities). They then enter information about they images they see.
What makes it exciting for volunteers (aside from just being able to help out on a major astronomy project) is the fact that most of the images have never been seen by human eyes before. The cosmic objects in the images range from hum-drum, textbook elliptical blobs to multi-system galactic collisions, as in the image below, which your humble narrator discovered. (I call it "Dave Nagel's Funktastic Galactic Hellpocalypse of Joy." Update your almanacs accordingly.)
As seen in the image above, there are five pieces of information users can enter about a galaxy: spiral clockwise, spiral counterclockwise, spiral edge-on, elliptical, and merger. There's also a button for "star/don't know," in the event that an image is indecipherable or contains a non-galactic object, such as a star, satellite, Great Old One, etc.
Images come from a 142 megapixel camera mounted on a 8.2-foot telescope in New Mexico used in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
"It is great that digital archives we have built for science are now being used by the public to look at the Universe. It's fundamental to our understanding," said Bob Nichol, University of Portsmouth Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation.
In order to minimize inaccuracies in data entered by volunteers, the universities have set up three mechanisms on GalaxyZoo. First, prospective volunteers are led through a tutorial on identifying basic characteristics of galaxies. They then take a test to ensure they meet minimal requirements (which, in this case, is correctly classifying at least eight out of 15 known galaxies). Once the test is passed, users can begin classifying galaxies. Some can be straightforward and obvious, like the clockwise-rotating spiral galaxy in the image below.
Others can be quite fuzzy or pixelated and difficult to classify. Some may also show multiple galaxies centered in the image that may at first appear to be merging galaxies but that may simply be tightly packed clusters of galaxies.
Recommended Reading
- Sun, Stanford Working To Archive History
In May in San Francisco, experts from leading universities, libraries, and research institutions around the world met as part of an ongoing effort to address a pressing issue: archiving the world's history, right up to today.
- The Quilt Coalition Rolls Out XO Communications for High-Capacity Network Services
The Quilt, a coalition of 28 regional network organizations, has added XO Communications Services to its authorized vendor list. The Quilt represents 200 universities and thousands of other educational institutions across the United States. With this new relationship, Quilt members can purchase XO's high-speed IP transit and network transport services at competitive rates.
- Wimba Classroom 5.2 Expands Classroom Capture Support, Adds MP3 Downloads
At the NECC 2008 conference in Texas this week, Wimba launched a new version of Wimba Classroom, the virtual classroom component of the company's Collaboration Suite. The new 5.2 release expands options for classroom capture and adds a variety of other functional and ease of use features.
- Automation Chimera: Education Is Not Management
The lure of automating workflow online so human intervention is minimized is continually reinforced in the minds of higher education administrators by examples of automated campus systems such as financials, student information systems, and other enterprise systems. But what's good for management is not always good for learning.
- Cognos Releases BI Software for Linux-based IBM System z Mainframe
Cognos, which IBM acquired in January, has released an update to its business intelligence software that will run on the Linux operating system on IBM System z mainframes. IBM Cognos 8 BI was being developed by the two companies prior to the acquisition, but assimilation of Cognos into IBM accelerated development.
- Facebook and Collegiality: A Serendipitous Social Niche
Facebook is a way to greet a colleague as if she or he is on your own campus: a wave at a distance, a hello at the corner burrito place, a honk as you both leave the campus parking lot. Informal collegiality has been extended over the miles.
