Zooming into outer space

摘要

I AM peering deep into the cosmos. I can see a cluster of bright lights shining in the distance - a faraway galaxy. I click "smooth" when asked about its shape. I am an armchair astronomer, flicking through telescope images to help researchers who are studying remote galaxies. There are more images from telescopes than researchers could ever analyse on their own. Since the Galaxy Zoo citizen science project was launched more than 10 years ago, hundreds of thousands of people have helped identify more than a million galaxies of a wide variety of shapes and sizes as well as identifying previously undiscovered interstellar phenomena.