Meet the scientists!

Galaxy Zoo (link) is an internet based project where anyone can contribute to astronomy. If you log onto the site you will be asked to help astronomers classify galaxies by how they look.

In my research I use the information which has been collected by Galaxy Zoo over the last 4 years along with other information about galaxies (like how many stars they have, what colours those stars are etc) to try to learn about how different galaxies in our universe might have formed and how they transform over time.

Last year I made the below video for National Science and Engineering Week where I talk about why I like to study galaxies.

(done in collaboration with the University of Portsmouth’s Creative Technologies Department, this was shown on BBC Big Screens across the country).

Here’s me at my desk at work

One of the best things about my job I think is the variety of tasks. For example today after I write this I’m then going finish getting ready for a school visit where I’ll give two talks. One about the scale of the Universe, and the other about why the world won’t end later this year.

Another task on my to do list today it to make a different plot looking at correlations of bars from Galaxy Zoo with the amount of star formation fuel in a galaxy. I was talking about what I see with another scientist recently, and he suggested a different way of looking at the data might help. So later on I’ll try that.

A beautiful barred spiral imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope. I want to understand what this bar (the line across the centre) might be doing to the galaxy.

(read more about this image in a Galaxy Zoo blog post I wrote about it).

I will use about half of the money to buy a telescope which can track the sky to help in our “Astronomy in the City” outreach. I want to buy an easy to use telescope specifically to help young children get their first look at the stars. I want it to track so I can talk to people about what they’re seeing instead of spending time adjusting what the telescope looks at.

I will use the other half to buy models of the solar system which I will take on my visits to local primary schools. I will use the model in a demo about the scale of the universe and then leave it behind for the school to use.

(My colleage Claudia Maraston recently visited a local primary with the model planets, and got this great picture, but we couldn’t leave this set behind as it’s the only one we have!).