Radio Galaxy Zoo
Using a large number of classifications provided by citizen scientists they hope to build a more complete picture of black holes at various stages and their origin.
[3][4] It was initiated in 2010 by Ray Norris in collaboration with the Zooniverse team, and was driven by the need to cross-identify the millions of extragalactic radio sources that will be discovered by the forthcoming Evolutionary Map of the Universe survey.
"[1] Its aims are that when complete, RGZ will measure the relative populations and properties of host galaxies; processes that might also provide an avenue for finding radio structures that are rare and extreme.
[9] The research team tested trained citizen scientists and ten professional astronomers using a hundred images to help quantify the quality of the data gathered.
Radio morphology suggests that, firstly, "the host galaxy is moving at a significant velocity with respect to an ambient medium like that of at least a poor cluster" and secondly that "the source may have had two ignition events of the active galactic nucleus with 10^7yrs in between.
[10] On The Conversation website in an article "How citizen scientists discovered a giant cluster of galaxies", Ray Norris writes about the above study.
[5] He explains that two Russian citizen scientists (CSs), Ivan Terentev and Tim Matorny, were participating in RGZ when they noticed something odd with one of the radio sources.
"[5] WATGs are rare objects that are formed when jets of electrons from black holes, usually seen to be straight, are bent into a C shape by intergalactic gas.
"This cluster, more than a billion light years away, contains at least 40 galaxies, marking an intersection of the sheets and filaments of the cosmic web that make up our universe.
"[13] In an article on the ARC Centre of Excellence for All-Sky Astrophysics CAASTRO website named "Citizen scientists bag a bunch of 'two-faced' galaxies", the author explains the findings of the above study.
"[14] Explanations include the behaviour of the central black hole, different densities of matter in the surrounding environment or simply illusions because of different distances.
[16] In May 2018, Lukic and team published a study in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society concerning machine learning techniques.
[17][18] The program's abstract begins: "The classic Galaxy Zoo project and its successors have been rich sources of interesting astrophysics beyond their initial goals.
"[17] As a result of NASA 'gap fillers' initiative, it is hoped that significant scientific progress can be made by HST observations of a total of 304 objects, which have been chosen by voters using a Zooniverse custom-made interface.
