Hanny's Voorwerp

Courtesy of  http://www.hannysvoorwerp.com/ 

Two years ago, before Lab Coat Pajamas was put on hiatus, I was preparing a blog post about Hanny and the mystery of the Voorwerp. The reason behind this post was to illustrate how the public can be involved in astronomical research and make a significant impact in astronomy simply by participating. Let me give you a little background on Hanny's contributions.
   
Several years ago a project went live on the internet that gave internet users an opportunity to screen survey images of galaxies and identify them. It is called http://www.galaxyzoo.org/ and is one of many solutions researchers have come up with to curtail the significant loss in funding over the years. I can attest to the difficulty the research community has with continuing projects while funding continues to drop. In my own science world, I am working independently on a project that used to require three people to support. Of course I have taken similar steps in deploying automation and remote usage which significantly reduces the time investment and cost similar to the Galaxy Zoo project.

So if there is an upside to reduction in funding it is that we have seen a dramatic upswing in innovation to accomplish research goals. In this case the Galaxy Zoo developed a system that trains users on galaxy identification and then lets the user rate image after image on the type of galaxy and direction of spin. Each image is rated by several users and in the end, consensus makes the call and the galaxy gets an identification (this is all peer reviewed of course). This is a spectacular design and it brings science into the hands of the public where it needs to be. After all, without support for science, it would never be done and where would the human race be?

So Hanny is  “The Dutch schoolteacher and Queen admirer who discovered Hanny’s Voorwerp”,
(Voorwerp by the way is the dutch word for object). This school teacher was scrolling through the images while on Galaxy Zoo and noticed something in the field that did not look like a galaxy. She reported it, just as they say you should in the manual, and it turned out that what she had found was an unknown object.

This stirred up quite a storm and in the end, Hanny not only got the credit for the discovery, there was a comic book written about the event. I got an advanced copy myself. This inspired me to begin writing a fictional series about as science guy hero taking on real dangers in the universe to save the planet (coming soon).

This event has had a number of positive outcomes. First, this group of researchers got lots of help in identifying a large catalog of new galaxy's. Two, a new celestial object was discovered. Three, Hanny got to participate in something not many people get to do, and got some notoriety from it. And four, the writing of the comic book by the research team brought the whole event into the minds of the next generation of potential scientist. I am sure this has had an inspiring effect just as Star Trek and Star Wars had for my generation. Many of the current scientist and engineers I work with have held hope that the Star Trek episodes they watched as kids would become a reality in the world they would live in as adults. And many of them have gone far beyond what they had dreamed about as children.

Good for Hanney, and hats off to Galaxy Zoo. There are many other projects that do similar work using distributed computing systems and the internet. I encourage everyone interested in participating to check it out.

http://www.galaxyzoo.org/

http://www.hannysvoorwerp.com/

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110210.html

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/