Chris Lintott’s Universe

It’s been 19 months since the launch of the original Galaxy Zoo. That week was ridiculous - my main memory is of incredulous laughter as the number of users and classifications climbed and climbed and I, and the rest of the team, realised what we had on our hands.

Since then, we’ve made a lot of use of the results, but I’ve also spent a lot of time talking to all sorts of people and plotting to expand the project way beyond its original scope. Real people are now employed to make this happen, and Galaxy Zoo 2 which launched on Tuesday is our first site to use a new, extremely flexible interface.

It’s all come together rather rapidly in the last few weeks. On Monday night, I talked to the University’s Space and Astronomy society and told them the launch was only an hour or two away. Opening my laptop and connecting to the net on the train, I saw the new site appear. By chance I’d logged on 20 seconds after the beginning. I wonder if I was the first to see it?

I stayed up for a couple of hours that night watching the forum and email to see how reactions were. People were positive, but it stayed quiet and there was no flurry of press attention to mark the end of our press release’s embargo.

I lay in bed that night wondering if we’d just lost a colossal gamble. Perhaps we didn’t understand what it was about Galaxy Zoo that attracted people. Perhaps it really was just a one-off. It still seemed quiet the next morning as I watch the first report on BBC Breakfast TV, at 6.20, but I didn’t have time to think before being picked up and whisked off to Television Centre for more interviews.

And then we were off. More breakfast tv at 7.20, upstairs to 5 Live with Annie, one of our users, for 7.55 before that got bumped. Then back downstairs for more TV at 8.20 (Annie was great!) and then, as she headed off to work upstairs again for Radio 4. Once more I was sitting opposite John Humphrys, and we had a lot of fun on Today getting more and more enthusiastic about the project.

Spat out in the corridor, I was grabbed by the World Service for a quick interview, by now working completely on automatic. Just as quickly I found myself in a cab and at Paddington, and on a train to Oxford had time to catch my breath.

The site was clearly struggling, but stayed up (which is more than we managed for Galaxy Zoo 1) which I think is a pretty impressive achievement. More importantly, we were busy which meant that people were interested, and would come back to the site. Galaxy Zoo 2 is going to work, and we are going to get the data we want. It’s an amazing feeling; a mixture of relief and excitement. Less incredulous laughter, more satisfied grinning, I suppose.

We’d scheduled a small celebration for 5pm in the department, but unfortunately Arfon our lead developer had a bright idea just as the clock ticked toward 5, and he spent the whole time typing frantically, champagne at his side.

Since then, traffic has refused to die (which is fantastic) and as I write we’re on the front page of Digg.com so that’s not going to change any time soon. Thanks for your efforts - and the more classifications you do the sooner you’ll see what we’ve got up our sleeves for our next trick.

I’m on top of a mountain in Spain; if you’d like to join me on my observing run then I’ll be posting updates on the Galaxy Zoo Blog.

Here’s my talk from yesterday :

Live streaming video by Ustream

I’m in Cardiff, for the dot astronomy conference organised by Rob Simpson of the Orbiting Frog blog. It should be an interesting few days, and I’ll try and keep you up to date here. I’ve just given the first talk - about Galaxy Zoo and our plans for the future - and you can watch all of the talks live on ustream via the feed here.

(Embedded stream deleted now the talk is over)

All the videos will end up on youtube at the conference’s channel which is here.

Having been gently prodded by Nereid in the comments to my previous post on the topic, I want to say a lot more about scientific reporting. The reason for the delay in this post, by the way, is probably obvious but the screenshot below - which shows the front page of CNN.com yesterday afternoon says it all.

First off, it’s wonderful that we’re getting a new wave of interest in Galaxy Zoo, which is bringing with it a new flood of people eager to start classifying galaxies. The timing is great; we’re hopefully just a week or so away from the launch of Zoo 2 (don’t hold me to that) when there will be plenty more work to go around. However, I feel very, very uneasy about writing about the Voorwerp now; the paper which describes it has only been submitted to the journal, and it doesn’t yet have the stamp of peer review. For some projects, it makes sense to talk about results at this stage; if you have a beautiful picture of a spiral galaxy then you might as well release the picture and leave the details to the experts. But here at least part of the story lies in what we think the object is, and until that gets accepted by the journal we could all end up with lots of egg on our collective face. If I were our friendly (but thorough - as they should be) referee I’d be more than slightly annoyed that the authors of the paper were talking to the press.

So why are we talking to anyone? Because the steady drip feed of stories from journalists who had read our blog (or - better - who were active members of the zoo) was growing into a torrent, particularly in the Dutch media who recognised a fantastic story in Hanny’s discovery, and that rush of attention meant that if we were ever going to talk about this object we had to do it straight away, or risk losing the media’s attention.

So why did we blog the results as we went along? It’s something we’ve tried to do as we’ve gone through the process of converting clicks on the Galaxy Zoo website into science (current scorecard : 2 papers accepted, 2 under discussion with referees, 1 awaiting a response, many more on the way). The reasons for this are at least threefold. Firstly, I’m serious when I talk about the users of our website as our scientific collaborators. What they do makes the science possible, and it’s a matter of simple courtesy to tell them what we’re doing with it, and to recognise their contributions. Secondly, we were very, very excited about the Voorwerp, and to be honest have probably been talking excitedly about it to everyone we’ve come in contact with.

Thirdly, I strongly believe that something that the media are bad at is showing science in progress. If you read mainstream news coverage of science you’ll see a string of discoveries and eureka moments, but this isn’t how things are in reality. The reality of doing science day to day involves talking and arguing and thinking, and it’s in those arguments that the scientific method lurks. If you can’t defend your idea with data, whether talking to a journal’s referee, to your colleagues in the office down the corridor or even to yourself, then it doesn’t survive.

You wouldn’t get that impression from reading the press, or from the science education that schoolchildren receive. In both, there seems to lurk an assumption that science has a big book of facts which we’re slowly adding to by sitting quietly in ivory towers or in the bath and thinking before announcing The Truth to awestruck colleagues and Nobel prize committees.

Not only is this assumption wrong, but it’s dangerous too. The result of the public never seeing scientific disagreement and debate are horrific. Without any understanding of how to question a scientific statement, is it any surprise that the public are confused when scientist A says ‘Vaccines are safe’ and scientist B says ‘they may cause autism’, or when scientist C says ‘Global warming is man made’ and scientist D blames the Sun. Both are speaking with the Voice of Science (TM), but how to distinguish? To me it’s obvious - ask about their data sets, ask what other studies exist, ask what other explanations they considered and how they ruled them out and so on and so on. The public, confused by the sight of scientific disagreement, tends to throw up its arms and conclude that Science has nothing to say on the subject regardless of what the true weight of evidence is.

That’s why I’m a huge admirer of the way that at least my part of science has been moving - toward having data and papers freely available. Want to do your own project with the data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey? Here you go. Want to see the images that the Phoenix spacecraft took yesterday on Mars? Their gallery is updated as the images hit the ground, for anyone who cares to take a look.

Mentioning Phoenix, of course, is what opened this can of worms in the first place. There’s a good summary over at the planetary society of what happens if you think you’ve discovered perchlorate on Mars. Scientist Tom Pike weighs in on his blog, too. I don’t have much to add to that specifically, beyond pointing out that for all the references to ‘internet speculation’ the root of this story was a journalist for a print magazine doing good, old-fashioned journalism.

It’s a storm in a teacup which will soon be forgotten by all except those involved, and, no doubt, a bunch of conspiracy theorists who will see this as a leak from NASA’s otherwise excellent smokescreen which excludes all evidence of little green men from the public eye. I, though, am still angry that NASA and the Phoenix team - who were so open and hospitable to us when we filmed there a month or two ago - had to publicly insist they weren’t hiding anything.

If I had my way, it would be possible to have our arguments about what percholorate means for life on Mars, about what Hanny’s Voorwerp is and everything else right in the public eye. To do that, though, we need to help teach people how to argue with scientists and to argue like scientists. I truly believe that in releasing data fast NASA is helping achieve that, and that by blogging Galaxy Zoo’s journey we can too. Even if we end up talking about things before we’re sure about them.

I’m still in the US, where we’ve been filming pieces for the next few Sky at Nights. I need to write up the amazing two days we spent in mission control for Phoenix, but for now the Discovery blog has details of the Large Binocular Telescope and the alien-hunting Allen Telescope Array.

Having left the Sky at Night team crowing about their upgrade to first class on the way home and have headed off to visit Pamela. I’m giving a public talk tomorrow (Monday) night about Galaxy Zoo and citizen science more generally, and for those who can’t join us we’ll be broadcasting the event online.

The link is here, although you should be able to watch and chat below. The talk starts at 7pm Central, 1am Tuesday morning BST and midnight GMT.

Streaming Video by Ustream.TV

I’m shortly off of my travels again, recording interviews for Sky at Night in California and Arizona. On the way back, I’m visiting Pamela of astronomycast fame to work on a few projects. If anyone lives in or around St Louis, U.S.A., then you might be interested, nay, delighted, to know that you can come and listen to me talk about Galaxy Zoo and related issues on the evening of June 30th. Details are over here - and we’ll try and ustream the talk for those who can’t make it.

I wrote yesterday about the somewhat surprising link that’s been discovered between the tightness of a galaxy’s spiral arms (the angle at which they uncurl) and the size of the black hole that lurks in their centre. I managed to catch up with Marc Seigar, and the interview is now up on Youtube

One of the most intriguing of the morning press releases is now being described by Marc Seigar from the University of Arkansas, who has been trying to weigh the supermassive black holes that lurk at the centre of galaxies. Ideally, you’d do this by measuring the speed of the gas rotating around it, but that’s hard for distant galaxies.

Prof Seigar’s suggestion is to look not directly at the central gas, but - if the galaxy you’re interested in is a spiral - then you just look at the arms. His team found that the looser the arms, the smaller the black hole - and you could potentially see these features out to billions of light-years away. Compare Andromeda with the other major member (along with the Milky Way) of the local group, M33, the Triangulum Galaxy.

Andromeda has just about the tightest arms of any spiral galaxy, and a large black hole, weighing in at 180 million times the mass of the Sun. Triangulum has loose arms, and if it has a black hole at all it’s smaller than 1500 solar masses.

I have to confess I was sceptical about this release when I saw it, but the data shown during the press conference looks fairly convincing. It’s especially exciting for me as Galaxy Zoo 2 will collect information about the tightness of spiral arms among many other things, and it’s a fascinating thought to think that we might be probing the behaviour of the central black hole at the same time.

What is causing this link? It’s fair to say that they don’t know, but are blaming differences in the distribution of dark matter.

I know I promised you a Mercury post. I’ve been distracted by this thing, discovered by one of the Galaxy Zoo users, Hanny.

The question is - what is it? We’re applying to use the VLA to find out, and the deadline’s tonight.