Pro-Am revolution in Astronomy

Over 100.000 people have responded to the call of GalaxyZoo to help with the classification of pictures of galaxies. The result of this mass collaboration is that every picture of galaxies that was uploaded on the site was analyzed and rated 30 times reaching high levels of validity.
“We’ve proved that random people are as good as professional astronomers” says Oxford team member Dr Chris Lintott.

The pro-am revolution has reached astronomy!

There is a very large crowd that is very enthusiastic about astronomy. GalaxyZoo gives these people the opportunity to put their passion to use. Moreover their input is now scientifically proven to be very valuable. Not only are human eyes much better able to classify galaxies than computers: there seems to be no significant difference in the classification of professional astronomers and the crowds.

The large community on the site enables the analysis of far more pictures than would otherwise be possible. And not without results: the survey revealed that the collections of millions of stars, dust, gas and planets in galaxies prefer to rotate anticlockwise from the viewpoint of an observer on Earth. This was unexpected; scientists always thought clockwise and anti-clockwise spinning galaxies would be evenly distributed.

What we can learn from this example that when there are people passionate about a topic you are working on, there is a high chance you can involve these people in your work. Research is thus proven to be yet another fied of applications for crowdsourcing. We are very curious to see how this trend develops. The galaxyzoo platform is produced very well and will have cost quite a bit I think. Therefore I’d say other researchers should be looking into using platforms like Mechanical Turk to build their applications on. Although this is a paid platform, the crowds and technology are already present.

Source: Telegraph.co.uk