Since the creation of the internet and a colossal worldwide growth of personal computers, there has been a gradual change in the way some scientific research is carried out. Initially, idle computing power was donated by people wishing to contribute to science projects such as Einstein@Home, in order to perform computationally demanding tasks faster. However recently scientists have become just as interested in the brain power of people around the world to help them with ongoing science problems. Galaxy Zoo and the larger suite of Zooniverse projects have successfully built the largest (nearly 0.5 million) and most popular online community of ‘citizen scientists’ who are eager to participate in scientific projects. Citizen scientists have helped classify hundreds of thousands of galaxy images taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, as well as identifying a new type of greenish compact galaxies called Green Pea’s, which computer algorithms had previously been unable to spot, highlighting a key advantage for employing this type of analysis. The Milky Way Project is the ninth project to be contributed to by online citizen scientists, for which users are tasked with identifying bubbles of infrared emission in images taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope. These infrared bubbles are common features of regions of ionised gas and dust in the Milky Way and other galaxies that are undergoing star formation, which are of interest to astronomers. In a recent paper available on arXiv, it was shown that about 35,000 citizen scientists collectively found 5106 bubbles including at least 86% of objects already catalogued by experts, showing that the human eye and projects like this are an important tool for future astrophysics research.
Pop-upView Separately

Since the creation of the internet and a colossal worldwide growth of personal computers, there has been a gradual change in the way some scientific research is carried out. Initially, idle computing power was donated by people wishing to contribute to science projects such as Einstein@Home, in order to perform computationally demanding tasks faster. However recently scientists have become just as interested in the brain power of people around the world to help them with ongoing science problems. Galaxy Zoo and the larger suite of Zooniverse projects have successfully built the largest (nearly 0.5 million) and most popular online community of ‘citizen scientists’ who are eager to participate in scientific projects. Citizen scientists have helped classify hundreds of thousands of galaxy images taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, as well as identifying a new type of greenish compact galaxies called Green Pea’s, which computer algorithms had previously been unable to spot, highlighting a key advantage for employing this type of analysis.

The Milky Way Project is the ninth project to be contributed to by online citizen scientists, for which users are tasked with identifying bubbles of infrared emission in images taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope. These infrared bubbles are common features of regions of ionised gas and dust in the Milky Way and other galaxies that are undergoing star formation, which are of interest to astronomers. In a recent paper available on arXiv, it was shown that about 35,000 citizen scientists collectively found 5106 bubbles including at least 86% of objects already catalogued by experts, showing that the human eye and projects like this are an important tool for future astrophysics research.