Armchair astronomers have helped discover
a batch of tiny galaxies that may help professional astronomers understand how galaxies formed
stars in the early universe.
Dubbed the "Green
Peas," the galaxies are forming stars 10 times faster than the Milky Way despite being 10 times
smaller and 100 times less massive. They are between 1.5
billion and 5 billion light years away
"These are among the
most extremely active star-forming galaxies we've ever found," said
Carolin Cardamone, lead author of a paper on the discoveries to be published in an upcoming
issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The discoveries were made as
part of a project called Galaxy Zoo, where Internet users volunteer their spare
time to help classify galaxies for an online image database.
Murmurs of a potential
discovery began when a group of volunteers who called themselves the "Peas
Corps" and the "Peas Brigade" started a discussion in an online
forum about a group of strange bright green objects. The original forum thread
was called "Give peas a chance."
The volunteers – many of
whom had no previous astronomy background or experience – were asked to refine
their image samples and submit them to a lab for color analysis. Once the
findings were verified, researchers analyzed the light emanating from the
galaxies to determine the degree of star
formation taking place within them.
"No one person could
have done this on their own," Cardamone said. "Even if we had managed
to look through 10,000 of these images, we would have only come across a few
Green Peas and wouldn't have recognized them as a unique class of
galaxies."
Of the one million galaxies that make up the image bank,
the researchers found only 250 Green Peas.
"These galaxies would
have been normal in the early universe, but we just don't see such active
galaxies today," said Kevin Schawinski, co-founder of Galaxy Zoo.
"Understanding the Green Peas may tell us something about how
stars were formed in the early universe and how
galaxies evolve."
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