Unlike other scientific disciplines, astronomy has never eschewed its amateur beginnings. Often described as the most ancient of the natural sciences, it’s always maintained a healthy relationship with the public.
And in the 21st century, it seems, that partnership has come into its own. Coupled with advanced computing, the passion of the backyard sky-watcher is now helping to drive an unprecedented change in our ability to understand the cosmos.
On the technical side of things, it’s hard to underestimate the scale of the transformation currently taking place.
We have efficient detectors, we have efficient storage devices, efficient data buckets that can store all this data, but we're not meeting the challenge of organising the data properly or even analysing the data.
The CSIRO, for example, is currently involved in the construction of a massive multi-billion dollar radio-telescope called the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) which will span continents and have a survey speed 10,000 times fast than anything currently in use.
It’s in large part because of such projects that Professor Ray Norris from the Australia Telescope National Facility confidently declares that astronomy is now entering what he calls a ‘golden age’.
‘We're building these fantastic instruments at the moment. The technology is leaping ahead, and also our understanding,’ he says. ‘If you look back 50 years, building a telescope was all about big engineering. In my own field, radio astronomy, we built the big dishes, like Parkes and Jodrell and things like that. Nowadays we tend to build smaller dishes, arrays of small dishes which are tied together with computers. There's no way you could have done that 50 years ago, you just didn't have the computing capacity.’
As a result of that change, Professor Norris says the volume of discovery has increased a hundredfold in just a few short years.
But successful innovation has also brought with it a problem of scale. So much data is now being collected that scientific institutions are finding it impossible to keep pace.
‘We have efficient detectors, we have efficient storage devices, efficient data buckets that can store all this data, but we're not meeting the challenge of organising the data properly or even analysing the data,’ says Dr Alberto Conti from the Space Telescope Science Institute in the US city of Baltimore, a leading astrophysicist who freely admits he now spends far more time in front of a computer than gazing through a view-finder.
One solution to the overload problem has been to throw open the doors to amateur involvement. When Chris Lintott at Oxford University set up a website called Galaxy Zoo in 2007 he was hoping to attract volunteers to help categorise the vast number of images secured by the Hubble Telescope—swirling patterns of distant galaxies.
The project was an immediate success. ‘By the end of the first day we were doing something like 70,000 classifications an hour,’ says Dr Lintott.
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In the years since then more than 250,000 people have taken part in Galaxy Zoo, among them Alice Sheppard who quickly found herself enlisted as the volunteer moderator for the site’s forum. Says Sheppard, ‘We've got students, we've got teenagers, we've got people in their 80s, we've got some pretty high-up academics as well. Anyone who can get on the internet is there. It's such a great mix.’
Galaxy Zoo has now spawned a raft of similar ‘citizen science’ initiatives. And says Chris Lintott, his ‘zooites’ have shown that even in an age of high-tech computing, human beings can still play a vital role in discovery.
‘This is a pattern recognition task, so it's about being able to distinguish patterns in often quite fuzzy images, and we're quite good at that. We do pattern recognition all the time,’ he says.
‘It turns out that by inviting hundreds of thousands of people to take part we not only get good classifications of the galaxies but we also get a pretty good catalogue of the weird and the wonderful, the objects that are literally one in a million in this dataset, and we can pull those out and pay attention to them. And that sort of serendipitous discovery is something that you need humans to be able to do,’ Dr Lintott adds. ‘It's sort of reassuring to think the humans are still winning.’
This program was originally broadcast on 10 February 2013. To hear more about Galaxy Zoo and how amateurs are making an impact in astronomy, listen to Future Tense here.