A Christmas present from Galaxy Zoo

Dear Galaxy Zoo: Thanks to your hard work, we’ve managed to classify most of the galaxies that were in our original batch of images from the Hubble Space Telescope. Don’t worry, though, because from today there are fresh, never before seen galaxies added to the interface at www.galaxyzoo.org.
In addition, you’ll find a new section of the website – ‘Explore galaxies’ – containing a whole host of material about extragalactic astronomy. You can get there directly via http://www.galaxyzoo.org/explore_galaxies. We’ve also added daily quiz questions. These are used for research into learning, and we’re hoping you’ll take a few moments to help us understand what you know about galaxies.

The new images are drawn from Hubble’s COSMOS: The Cosmic Evolution Survey. These images, taken during 590 orbits of the Hubble Space Telescope, map out a 2 square-degree region of the sky. These images are sensitive enough to see objects almost 100 times fainter than those that appeared in the original Galaxy Zoo. These images have been used to map out the distribution of dark matter and the large-scale structure of the universe. Now, thanks to you, these images can extend our understanding of galaxy morphology out to more distant galaxies and down to fainter nearby galaxies.

Learn more about these changes on the blog at: http://blogs.zooniverse.org/galaxyzoo/2010/12/21/new-content-new-images-a-refreshed-galaxy-zoo/

We look forward to seeing you Explore Galaxies.

Cheers

The Galaxy Zoo Team