A citizen science team has enabled researchers at the University of Manchester (UK) to discover up to 40,000 new ring galaxies.
“Galaxies live a chaotic life,” said lead author Mike Walmsley, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Manchester, applying advances in deep learning research to astrophysics. “Collisions with other galaxies and bursts of energy from supermassive black holes alter the colors and orbits of billions of stars, leaving telltale markers that volunteers look for on the Galaxy Zoo website.” But understanding exactly which cosmic events lead to which markers requires millions of measured images, more than humans could ever search for.”
15 years of the Galaxy Zoo project
In the new work, presented at the 2022 National Astronomy Meeting (NAM 2022), the researchers used a decade of measurements from Galaxy Zoo.
“Galaxy Zoo turns 15 this week and we are still innovating ,” said Galaxy Zoo Deputy Principal Investigator Brooke Simmons, an astronomer at Lancaster University. “This work will make it possible for a new generation of discoveries to be made from the next big surveys of galaxies.”
For this finding, astronomers created a new deep learning algorithm, called Zoobot , that can not only accurately predict what Galaxy Zoo volunteers would say, but also understand where it might be wrong.
“Zoobot is designed to be retrained over and over again for new scientific goals. Just as a musician can learn a new instrument faster than his first instrument, Zoobot can learn to answer questions about new forms easily because he has already learned to answer more than 50 different questions.”
ring galaxies
“Rings take billions of years to form and are destroyed in galaxy-galaxy collisions, so this giant new sample will help reveal how isolated galaxies evolve,” the authors said. ” The data set will also tell scientists how galaxies age in general.”
Referencia: The scientists presented their results this month at the 2022 National Astronomy Meeting (NAM 2022). NASA / ESA / Hubble / R. Buta. University of Alabama
