Interview with the author

Chris Lintott

How have advances in technology influenced citizen science?

Citizen science is an old idea for astronomers. Observers with back garden equipment have been monitoring the planets, finding supernovae and counting meteors for centuries! The advance in technology has created new opportunities – professional surveys of the sky produce a wealth of data, and the advent of the web means we can all get our hands on it.

What have been Galaxy Zoo’s biggest discoveries?

Probably my favourite is Hanny’s Voorwerp, a galaxy-sized glowing gas cloud discovered by Dutch schoolteacher Hanny van Arkel. The gas in the Voorwerp is excited by the neighbouring galaxy, which would once have been our nearest quasar. A discovery that started with Hanny asking a simple question “What is this thing?” ended up involving observatories around the world and in space to find an answer.

Are humans more useful than smart computers?

Since we started Galaxy Zoo people have been assuming computers would take over, and it’s true that automated pattern recognition has come a long way in the last decade. Combining human and machine classification gives better results than either on their own. The machines do the bulk of the work, but you still get that human ability to be surprised and to deal with the unexpected. We need to work with our robot colleagues, not see them as competition!

is a co-presenter on The Sky at Night and lead of numerous citizen science projects.