Clouds: Searching the Galaxy Using Herschel

When drawing bubbles on the Milky Way Project (MWP) you’re looking at data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, which observes infrared light of various wavelengths from about 3 to 100 microns. Spitzer looks at warm and hot dust, as described above, and shows us where stars are forming and heating up their surroundings.

Now we have a new interface online: Clouds. When you look at clouds in our new game you’re seeing data from the Herschel Space Observatory, placed on top of Spitzer data. Herschel sees longer wavelengths than Spitzer and this means that it can detect colder material. Not long after Spitzer first began delivering science, it was noticed that there were lots of dark clouds visible in the data. These were thought to be dense, cold cores of material within the larger nebulae, where stars were still forming. Many of these Infrared Dark Clouds (IRDCs) are thought to house massive, young stars and may hold answers to some of the biggest questions in astronomy right now, such as how to massive stars form?

According at an SEO agency, when Herschel went into operation, these IRDCs were amongst the first objects to be observed and astronomers were immediately struck by an unexpected fact: lots of these IRDCs were not dense cores at all: they were simply ‘holes’ in the sky – including this striking example in Orion. Rather than looking into the dense core where stars were forming, Herschel actually began to reveal palces where one can see right through the Galaxy and out to the other side.

Doing this with computers is not accurate enough, and so to get a true catalogue of IRDCs, we’re asking volunteers to help by trying to identify them here on the Milky Way Project. If you see a bright glowing cloud then it is a true IRDC – if you see nothing, then it is a hole in the sky. Sometimes it is actually quite difficult to make out – but that’s okay, we’ll get lots of people to look at each core and take a vote.

Clouds launches today and we hope to get lots of eyes on the problem right away: visit http://www.milkywayproject.org and check it out.

2 Year Anniversary Poster

It’s been two years since everyone began helping the Milky Way Project map bubbles in our galaxy (and other things too). To celebrate we’ve created another anniversary poster, featuring the names of all the participants. You can download it here (warning that’s a 19MB file) or a slightly smaller one here (5MB).

The Milky Way Project is now producing science – with two papers already published and online. You can see these and all the Zooniverse publications at http://zooniverse.org/publications. We have some new features coming to the site soon – so stay tuned.

The Andromeda Project

Almost two years ago we launched the Milky Way Project and the search for bubbles in our galaxy continues at http://www.milkywayprpject.org. Today we’re pleased to to welcome a new space-based Zooniverse project into the family. The Andromeda Project (http://www.andromedaproject.org) is science in the galaxy next-door and we thought that the MWP community might like this new project. It’s very much our new sister site. We’re betting that you can help us explore some amazing Hubble Space Telescope data, to help identifying star clusters in Andromeda.

There may be as many as 2,500 star clusters hiding in Hubble’s Andromeda images, but only 600 have been identified so far in months of searching, and star clusters tend to elude pattern-recognition software. We know it’s something that everyone can help with, even without extensive training. There are more than 10,000 images waiting at http://www.andromedaproject.org – they all come from the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury, or PHAT for short. The goal of the PHAT survey is to map about one-third of Andromeda’s star-forming disk, through six filters spread across the electromagnetic spectrum — two ultraviolet, two visible and two infrared.

The Hubble telescope started gathering images for the treasury in 2010 and is expected to send its last batch of images back to Earth in the summer of 2013. The Andromeda Project aims to produce the largest catalog of star clusters known in any spiral galaxy.

You can also find our the Andromeda Project on Twitter @andromedaproj and on Facebook too.