December 23, 2024

Hubble Spies a Galactic Gem: Unusual Multi-Armed Galaxy Merger

Galaxy CGCG 396-2, an uncommon multi-armed galaxy merger that lies around 520 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Orion, as caught by the Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: ESA/Hubble & & NASA, W. Keel
Galaxy CGCG 396-2, an unusual multi-armed galaxy merger that lies around 520 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Orion, is captured in this stunning NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope observation.
This observation is a gem from a person science job, called the Galaxy Zoo project, in which hundreds of countless volunteers categorized galaxies to assist researchers resolve an issue of astronomical proportions– how to arrange through the huge amounts of data produced by robotic telescopes. Following a public vote, a choice of the most astronomically appealing objects from the Galaxy Zoo was picked for follow-up observations with Hubble. CGCG 396-2 is among things the things selected, and it was caught in this image by Hubbles Advanced Camera for Surveys.
When an astronomer was provided the impossibly mind-numbing job of classifying more than 900,000 galaxies by eye, the Galaxy Zoo task originated. By making a web interface and inviting person researchers to add to the obstacle, the Galaxy Zoo team had the ability to crowdsource the analysis. It was an amazing success: within 6 months a legion of 100,000 volunteer citizen astronomers had actually contributed more than 40 million galaxy classifications.

Since its initial success, the Galaxy Zoo project and its follower projects have contributed to more than 100 peer-reviewed scientific posts and resulted in an abundant variety of intriguing astronomical discoveries above and beyond their initial objectives. The success of the job likewise inspired more than 100 citizen science tasks on the Zooniverse portal, ranging from evaluating information from the ESA Rosetta spacecrafts see to Comet 67P/Churyumov– Gerasimenko to counting killer whales around remote Alaskan islands!

By ESA/Hubble
July 3, 2022