A new website will let people play a form of "cosmic
slot machine," matching up images of colliding galaxies with millions of
simulated mash-ups to find the best model.
Astronomers call these cosmic collisions "galactic
mergers." Studying these mergers could explain why the universe has
the mix
of galaxy types – from those with wound-up spiral arms to compact balls of
stars – that it does.
And it turns out that the human eye is much better than a
computer at matching up images of real mergers with randomly-selected images of
simulated mergers.
The new website aims to put this human talent to use.
Galaxy Zoo Mergers, which goes live on Nov. 24 at
http://mergers.galaxyzoo.org is an international project led by scientists from
Oxford University in the U.K. and George Mason University in Virginia.
"Visitors to the Galaxy Zoo
Mergers site use what's rather like a giant slot machine, with a real image of
a galactic merger in the center and eight randomly selected simulated merger
images filling the other eight 'slots' around it," said Chris Lintott of
Oxford University's Department of Physics and a galaxyzoo.org team member.
"By randomly cycling through the millions of simulated
possibilities and selecting only the very best matches they are helping to
build up a profile of what kind of factors are necessary to create the galaxies
we see in the Universe around us – and, hopefully, having fun too!" Lintott
added.
Users can do more than simply select images, they can also
take direct control of the simulations – choosing 'more' or 'fewer stars' or
'flipping' galaxies – in order to provide an exact match to what we see in the
Universe.
"Whilst we're challenging the 250,000 existing users of
the original Galaxy Zoo site to take part in this new project, anyone is
welcome to join in – you don't have to be an expert, in fact our evidence shows
that not being an expert actually makes you better at this sort of task," said
George Mason astronomer John Wallin.
The project will focus on around 3,000 images of real
galactic mergers identified through the Galaxy Zoo project – it also features
some new images of these mergers taken by the Hubble
Space Telescope.
The next stage will be to investigate the 'before' and
'after' of these colliding galaxies to work out what caused them and what will
happen next – rather like trying to capture the slow motion detail of the
moments before a car crash and predict the aftermath.
"These collisions take millions of years to unfold and
so all we get from the Universe is a single snapshot of each one. By producing
simulations, we will be able to watch each cosmic car crash unfold in the
computer," said Anthony Holincheck, a graduate student at George Mason University and galaxyzoo.org team member.
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