Chris Lintott

University of Oxford

Research field

Galaxy evolution and citizen science

Chris Lintott led Galaxy Zoo, a project in which about 100,000 volunteers classified nearly one million galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey as spirals or ellipticals. The first paper shows that the combined votes match the classifications of professional astronomers, and that color alone is not a reliable substitute for looking at the shape of a galaxy. The unit uses the project to show how the Hubble classification is applied to modern surveys.

In the masterclass

Section 4.1 on the Hubble sequence ends with the Galaxy Zoo classification of a million galaxies.

The research is presented in Unit 8: The Milky Way, Galaxies and the Expanding Universe, in a research spotlight box that explains the result at the level of the unit and links it to the physics you have just learned.

The paper

Galaxy Zoo: morphologies derived from visual inspection of galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey