Galaxy Quest!

On October 31st, I was paging through last months copy of Sky and Telescope, which I had checked out of the Southshore Library. I have always had a passing interest in astronomy; even taking an introductory astronomy course in college.

I read an article about the “Voorwoop” object, that was first seen by a Dutch school teacher doing classifications of galaxies for the “Galaxy Zoo” project. In a bit of bilingual redundancy, voorwoop is Dutch for “object.” Anyway, I was curious to know how a simple school teacher found this celestial object of interest. What was the Galaxy Zoo Project anyway?

I googled the Galaxy Zoo name and found a web site appropriately addressed as www.galaxyzoo.org. In the same spirit as the SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) website, http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/ allows you to download and analyze radio signals collected from space, Galaxy Zoo shows you pictures of galaxies to classify as either; smooth, round, almost round, cigar shaped, spiral, non-spiral and so on.

If this sounds dull, I can assure you it is not. I registered at the site, logged on and started classifying galaxies. On more than one occasion I was left open-mouthed and speechless as a picture of two spiral galaxies colliding or a screen filled with bright greens and reds with a yellow galaxy in the center filled my computer screen.

If you want to feel small and insignificant, and at the same time amazed, this is one way to do it.

The Galaxy Zoo website contains over one million digital images of galaxies, which were captured by a robotic telescope during the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Only one quarter of the sky has been surveyed by Sloan. Let that sink in a moment.

We live on the planet Earth, which orbits a star we call “the sun,” which is located part way out on a spiral arm of our galaxy, the Milky Way. The Milky Way Galaxy is estimated to contain 100 billion stars. One quarter of the sky surveyed by Sloan found one million galaxies. One can therefore calculate that there are approximately 4 million galaxies in the visible universe, with 100 billion stars in each galaxy (more or less).

All I can think of to say about all that is; My God.