Reinventing Discovery_ The New Era of Networked Science - Michael Nielsen [73]
In all, Galaxy Zoo has been used to write 22 scientific papers, on a wide variety of topics, and many more papers are on the way. The discoveries are sometimes serendipitous, as in the case of the voorwerp, and sometimes based on systematic analysis, as in the mergers project. Sometimes serendipity is followed up with extensive systematic analysis, as in the study of the green peas. Follow-up projects Galaxy Zoo 2 and Galaxy Zoo: Hubble have launched, and are providing even more detailed information about some of the galaxies observed by the SDSS, and also by the Hubble Space Telescope. Other new projects from the team that started Galaxy Zoo include Moon Zoo, which aims to better understand the craters on the moon, and Project Solar Storm Watch, which aims to spot explosions on the sun. One of the astronomers involved in Galaxy Zoo 2, Bob Nichol of the University of Portsmouth, contrasted Galaxy Zoo with everyday astronomy in this way:
Figure 7.3. Two merging spiral galaxies (known jointly as UGC 8335). Credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage (STScl/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration, and A. Evans (University of Virginia, Charlottesville/NRAO/Stony Brook University).
[In my everyday work] I can ask the question “how many galaxies have a bar through the middle of them” and typically I would embark on a career-long quest to answer this fundamental question. I may even recruit some poor graduate student to eyeball 50,000 galaxies to answer the question (like they did with Kevin!). But now, two dayafter the launch [of Galaxy Zoo 2], we already have the data to address this question and it’s a little too fast for an old-timer like me. . . . The internet is clearly the revolutionary technology of this generation of astronomer. . . . Galaxy Zoo is an amazing demonstration of how powerful this new tool can be [when] used to address new questions.
Like a computer, Galaxy Zoo can find patterns in large data sets, data sets far beyond the comprehension of any single individual. But Galaxy Zoo can go beyond computers, because it can also apply human intelligence in the analysis, the kind of intelligence that recognizes that the voorwerp or a green pea galaxy is out of the ordinary, and deserves further investigation. Galaxy Zoo is thus a hybrid, able to do deep analyses of large data sets that are impossible in any other way. It’s a new way of turning data into knowledge. Time and again, the Zookeepers meet new astronomers who say that their work could be aided by Galaxy Zoo, and more than twenty astronomers are now using Galaxy Zoo as a way of studying a broad range of astronomical questions. Galaxy Zoo is rapidly becoming a general-purpose platform connecting professional astronomers to interested members of the general public, so they can do science together.
When Amateurs Rival Professionals
It’s not just in astronomy that citizen science is useful. One of the big open problems in biology is to understand how the genetic code gives rise to an organism’s form. Of course, we’ve all heard many times that DNA is the “blueprint for life.” But even though the slogan is familiar—it is, after all, the fate of great slogans to become cliches—that doesn’t mean anyone yet understands in detail how DNA gives rise to life. Suppose biologists had never seen an elephant’s trunk. Could they look into an elephant’s DNA and somehow see the trunk there—that is, predict the trunk’s existence based solely on the sequence of base pairs in an elephant’s genetic code? Today, the answer to this question is no: how DNA determines an organism’s form is one of the mysteries of biology.
To help solve this mystery, a citizen science project called Foldit is recruiting online volunteers to play a computer game that challenges them to figure out how DNA gives rise to the molecules called proteins. That challenge may sound a far cry from deducing the existence of the elephant’s trunk—it is a far cry—but