New, supernova-tailored hunt on at Galaxy Zoo!
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on Thursday, August 13th, 2009 at 11:13 am and is filed under Astronomy.
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Throwing a bunch of people at a process that could never be covered by even the largest groups of astronomers and giving people access to tools that streamline the process is a really great idea, imo. I have my doubts about the accuracy of the observations people make, but I’m sure they have some kind of mechanism to look for similarities in results and bringing the more accurate observations to top attention.
Also, just having a unified collective of people sharing data and being part of a singular effort probably makes new discoveries more frequent. With the cosmos being so big, I’m sure many people make discoveries all the time without actually knowing they did. With this, it pretty much eliminates most of the problems related with that.
As utopian and ideal as this sounds, it wold be nice to see the scientific community make a move towards a singular group of scientists from every field. Probably wouldn’t work though: bureaucratic decisions, government involvement, funding issues, etc.
The bad astronomer brings up an interesting point in his blog about the project or projects like it, and how they can expand from just galaxy and supernova hunting to other things, such as asteroid hunting.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/08/14/supernova-hunt/