Space October 16, 2007
GalaxyZoo maps a lopsided universe
The GalaxyZoo project has announced its first preliminary results. As I mentioned before the GalaxyZoo project asks the general public to classify images of galaxies. The results they are announcing now is that galaxies tend to rotate counter-clockwise from our point of view. If that were to hold true there would need to be a unknown force acting upon them or the universe would need to be lopsided in some way. Naturally I have to wonder if there is a natural bias in the human eye/brain system that explains away this anomaly. Of course, they have already considered this and are investigating it by adding a bunch of mirror images into the database to see how they are categorized. This is quite an interesting project.
Another thing I find interesting is that when they compared their data to that of earlier work done professional astronomers they found that the self-selected general public is about as good at classifying galaxies.