There is nothing worse in the lockdown, than having nothing to do. With that, we’ve got something new to help you take some time off the clock. Most of the world is in lockdown, including Malaysia where there is a extended Movement Control Order (MCO), so this comes at a welcome time.
These two things that could potentially be your favourite new pastime, is helping scientists study distant galaxies and penguins. Arguably the two most important things in the world right now. This type of ‘science’ is referred to as citizen science, which essentially means the data is analysed by ordinary citizens.
It’s PENGUIN TIME
“I think where we can tap into people’s enthusiasm through their computer, that kind of captures the zeitgeist of coronavirus: what can we do when we’re all trapped at home,” Heather Lynch, a statistical ecologist at Stony Brook University in New York, said to Space.com.
Lynch is part of two citizen-science projects which aims to better understand penguins. The project is called Penguin Watch (quite literally) and will let you identify birds in photographs which are taken near their colonies.
It’s a kind of cool, and you’d be surprised how long you can get lost in just looking at penguins, identifying chicks, eggs, or even other animals in their habitats. Apparently, biologists find these birds by checking satellite imagery looking for their… poop, which scientists call guano.
“So we can map out how much area is covered in guano, and that gives us a really good estimate of how many penguins were actually at the colony at that particular location,” Lynch said.
These estimates are valuable data which are hard to acquire. This is mainly because scientists are unsure on how many penguins are in the Antarctic and just how their abundance was distributed because surveying Antartica is difficulty. Check out Penguin Watch here!
Woah, Space is crazy bro…
But if you weren’t a fan of penguins (I don’t know who these people are), you can check out another citizen-science project called Galaxy Zoo. This one to me, is a little tougher to categorise various galaxies but it’s still pretty cool to check out distant real galaxies from the comfort of your own home.
This project has been here for more than a decade, and is looking for volunteers to classify the shapes of galaxies.
“You don’t even need to know what a galaxy is,” Chris Lintott, astrophysicist at the University of Oxford said.
“The shape of a galaxy tells you about its history: it tells you about when it accreted material, when it collided with other galaxies, when it formed stars and all sorts of other things,” Lintott said.
“But astronomers are quite good at getting images of galaxies and less good at sorting through the data.”
So normal everyday citizens are given the opportunity to check out this supply of images, to help sort through the data. They’ve also added in a new feature to Galaxy Zoo which has added a new algorithm to classify the easiest galaxies, and saves the ‘stranger’ ones for volunteers. This is important as sometimes computers and the algorithm won’t find something that a human may notice.
The interesting part of this whole project is that the data is pulled from observatory programs, meaning there’s always something new on the site. You might be the first person to ‘discover’ a new galaxy, or just see something no one has ever seen before. Which I think is just so cool. Like I can’t even imagine what that would be like in real life, experiencing, and seeing a galaxy through my eyes. I’m not ever going to experience that, so this is pretty close.
It’s so surreal that I think it’s something people should really check out. To see for yourself, check out Galaxy Zoo here!
