We’re excited to announce that we have updated the Milky Way Project to show you more bubbles and to produce even more science! After creating our catalogue of 5,106 bubbles earlier this year, we’re aiming to try and refine and improve our measurements of the MWP Bubble catalogue by asking you to measure each and every bubble in greater detail. This means that for a while we’ll no longer be displaying images from across the plane of our Galaxy, but instead we’ll just be showing you images of regions where you told us that bubbles are located.
Our recently accepted Data Release 1 (DR1) paper, ‘A Bubblier Galactic Disk‘ is already online and being used by astrophysicists to help better understand star formation in our Galaxy. Later this month we’ll be presenting the MWP at the UK/Germany National Astronomy and SEO Consultant Meeting in Manchester. We will hopefully be able to bring you some updates at that time so you can follow along. In that paper we estimated that our rate of discovery of new bubbles had declined over time to the level where only a few new bubbles were being discovered each month. This make sense of course. The more people that inspect all the images on the site, the less likely it is for a bubble to remain undiscovered. What becomes important are the multiple, independent drawings of each bubble. To reflect this, we have updated the MWP site to shift from showing random portions of the Galaxy, to showing the places we believe there are bubbles – based on your classifications. Each image you are now shown on the site contains one of the 5,106 bubbles contained in the DR1 catalogue. It’s seems really fitting that the MWP community is now inspecting the very catalogue it created.
This update to the site has two effects. First of all it means that you are able to see each bubble more clearly and thus make more precise measurements of their shape, size and thickness. It also means that you see a lot more bubbles! There now ought to be at least one bubble in every image, which is a lot of fun. It also means that Talk has been updated with a host of new bubble-centrd images, showing off all 5,106 of the DR1 catalogue’s bubbles.
We have made some other updates to the site as well. We have put up our contributors page, which lists the names of everyone that made the DR1 paper possible. We have also finally added the term ‘Yellow Ball’ to our list of objects you can mark in images. The #yellowballs are a term coined on Talk by the MWP community and turn out to be interesting to researchers at they appear to represent ultra-compact star forming regions.
Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter @milkywayproj for the latest updates, and our Facebook page too.
The Milky Way Project Blog 
Although the images are now bubble-focused, I still would like to see a right-hand sidebar with a reminder list of all the features we should be looking for, from Green Knots to Yellow Balls. There is plenty of room on the page for this addition, and it would be easier than calling up and discarding flags to see the list. It’s really easy to get caught up in one or two feature and forget the others.
I would also like to see an “enlarge” or “full screen” button for the image itself, to save donning glasses and squinting at the screen.
But seriously — thank you for the opportunity to see these glorious images of our galaxy. The entire Zooniverse project is utterly, always, amazing.
Thanks for your comments Noharr. I will try and add a list of potential objects somewhere to remind people of what may be in the image – I like that idea. The images are at full-resolution so any zoom or enlarge function wouldn’t help to see more detail I’m, afraid.