Transcriber: Denise RQ Reviewer: Helena Bowen
Before I go on, let me make this clear:
I am not an astronomer; remember that.
I just accidentally discovered something in space
which astronomers named after me.
And I was able to do that through an online citizen science project
called "Galaxy Zoo".
Now, to explain this "Galaxy Zoo", I'll start close to home
with a picture of our planet Earth.
I'll keep zooming out.
This next one is the Sun, our most important star,
and the Earth is now a little dot underneath it;
and you probably already know this, but it's a nice reminder anyway.
Together with these other planets, we form the Solar System;
they all dance around the Sun, as well.
And the Solar System can be found in a galaxy like this one.
Now, in this picture, one pixel would be to big to represent the Sun,
and if that didn't blow your mind yet,
we have billions of these galaxies in our Universe.
And that's where Galaxy Zoo comes in.
Back in 2007, there were a couple of astronomers
doing research into these galaxies;
they were studying their shapes to learn about how they form,
and they had a data set of about a million pictures.
These pictures were automatically taken
with this long, digital, sky survey telescope,
and nobody had seen them before.
One of the astronomers, Kevin Schawinski had seen 17,000 of them, in one week,
before he decided there's just not enough coffee in the world to go on like that.
The other astronomer, Chris Lintott, came up with the idea,
"Let's put these pictures online, and ask the public to help us."
People like you and me.
They thought, "Well, we'll just put them there, we explain what we need from them,
and we'll let them help us."
And that's what they did.
And this is what it looks like.
You get one of these beautiful images on your screen if you log on,
and there is a set of buttons next to it.
You only have to press the button that best represents
the shape of the galaxy that you see in your image.
And you don't need to worry about making mistakes
because even though you might be the first person to see this image,
it will be shown to other people as well to make sure is statistically correct.
The other thing is, if you let people do it,
then they might see things that you didn't ask for;
like this picture.
I got this on my screen when I was about a week there;
I was an amateur astronomer for a week.
And I had to classify the galaxy in the middle, which I did,
pressed the button,
and then, I was wondering about this little blue smudge in it.
So I checked the examples that they gave, and it wasn't there.
Now, I didn't think I had discovered something new,
I was just curious,
so I sent Chris an email and I said, "What's this blue stuff below?"
But he didn't came back to me for a while, for two reasons:
one being that the project turned out to be a huge success,
so Chris had many emails,
- people asking him if they found a new alien or something;
I mean, to be fair, kind of looks like it -
but when he came to my email, he didn't know what it was,
he'd never seen anything like this.
And that could be very exciting,
but it might as well have been just a smudge indeed.
It was the former though;
they checked the area, and it was actually there.
It was not a camera defect or anything.
They also invited me on the team to investigate this thing
because they looked trough this data set of a million pictures,
and this was the only one.
So it's literally one in a million,
and they had no idea what it was.
During this process, it got the pet name Hanny's Voorwerp.
Hanny is my name,
and "voorwerp" is the slightly boring word for "object".
It was made up by another English volunteer,
because he knew I was Dutch, and I liked it;
especially because it stuck in the official paper
so that's the official name now internationally.
I can also tell you learn a lot from this, if you're invited on the team especially,
and one of the things we found out about it
is that it's actually green.
That's one of the first things we found out.
This has to do with the difference the filters that camera uses,
and the human eye sees it in green, so it's actually green.
But what is it?
It's a huge gas cloud, it's galaxy-size so it's very big.
We also know its location:
it's about 650 million light years from Earth.
Now, to me, that just means it's very, very, very far away.
We know it's relatively close to the other galaxy next to it,
with this slightly less exciting name, IC2497
- that was the one I had to classify -
and it's very bright and hot,
and at first, we couldn't see any starts in there,
so where did all that energy come from?
We didn't know that.
We do now, and this is how it works.
They call it the light echo.
What you need to know is that sometimes, these galaxies collide,
and they leave behind all this gas
which is not as bright;
and you also need to know that in the center of these galaxies
there are black holes.
They are known to absorb everything around them,
but sometimes, they turn active, and they sent jets out;
and the patch of gas that's now known as Hanny's Voorwerp
was lit up by such a jet.
So if you look at that, you're basically looking back at history
of what happened to the black hole.
So "Hanny's Voorwerp" was a big discovery in every sense of the word, accidentally;
and many discoveries followed after that.
So I think, of course I think that scientific research is very important
and everybody benefits from what scientists learn.
I'm a big fan of the citizen scientist projects
because everybody can be part of them even if you are not a scientist.
If you are a scientist, and you have an idea for a project
for which you would need the help of all these volunteers,
then you can contact Chris too, at the Citizen Science Alliance,
but if you are like me, you are curious, you are interested in scientific research,
then you can just log on to this universe, this universe.org,
and help change the world from your own computer screen.
Thank you.
(Applause)