One million strong:
Zooniverse enables anyone
to participate in science
volunteers in sifting through the massive amounts of
By Amjad P. Zaidi
The advent of faster, digital data capture and collected data. Essentially this approach has sped up
processing has been a boon in astronomy but created
a problem of too much data to analyse with too few years of human effort through global cooperation. As
professional astronomers.
In July 2007 University of Oxford based astronomer achieving many science goals and discoveries that
and BBC Sky at Night presenter Chris Lintott and a would otherwise take years with less human analysis and
team of astronomers from the University of Oxford pattern recognition. Furthermore the data analysed
tackled this enviable problem. Their goal was to detect from a variety of projects has led to the publication of
the positions and classify the morphology of a million
galaxies captured from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey is the main goal of all Zooniverse projects. As a hugely
positive side effect, the
(SDSS) in New Mexico,
enlistment of a global
and compare those to
community
of
citizen
their positions in the early
science volunteers has, by
universe. This would build
its very nature, supported
a picture of the universal
STEM outreach for formal
expansion of galaxies in
and informal education.
the 13.7 billion years since
Today, almost 30 citizen
the Big Bang.
science projects exist
The solutions were to
in Zooniverse. Uniquely
crowd source the problem
these all need the active
and release this data to
participation of human
the public. The Sloan data
volunteers to complete
sets were made available
research
tasks
across
online for volunteers. Their
many disciplines such
task: to sort, classify and Image #1: Map of the global Zooite community. Credit: ttfnrob/Zooniverse
as astronomy, ecology,
examine these individual
galaxies into distinct types (e.g. disks, ellipticals, nature, cell biology, humanities and climate science.
mergers, warped and spirals).
This small online citizen science project was named volunteers in the Zooniverse community (see image
Galaxy Zoo. Unexpectedly, the overwhelming volunteer #1) who are known as “Zooites” working on projects
response to the project made it incredibly popular,
with global input contributing to the wealth of real
t he vast power of citizen science. The spread of global
Zooites is clear.
Among the active space themed projects are:
of Galaxy Zoo’s launch, with multiple independent
• Galaxy Zoo (Launched 12 July 2007): The latest
Galaxy Zoo project. Users view galaxy images and
birthday over 150,000 volunteers had contributed to
are asked questions to determine its morphology. The
current sample includes high red-shift galaxies taken
Discovering the strong uptake of interest in citizen
from the Hubble Space Telescope and low red-shift
galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
Galaxy Zoo team saw an untapped reserve of global
talent to leverage for use in citizen science projects. • Moon Zoo (Launched 16 February 2009): High
resolution Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter photos
The Citizen Science Alliance was born and Zooniverse
of the Moon’s surface are used for detailed crater
was created shortly after.
counts and mapping lunar rocks ages.
Compiling dozens of projects maintained and
developed by the Citizen Science Alliance partners, • Solar Stormwatcher (Launched 21 December 2009):
Zooniverse focuses a global network of talented
Video imagery data from the twin STEREO spacecraft
www.RocketSTEM .org
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