Milky Way Project poster, presented at AAS #217 in Seattle, January 2011

1. V I S I T W W W. M I L K Y WAY P RO J E C T. O R G A N D W W W. Z O O N I V E R S E . O R G F O R M O R E I N F O
THE MILKY WAY PR JECT
Kim Arvidsson (Adler Planetarium), Robert Benjamin (University of Wisconsin-Whitewater), Eli Bressert (ESO, University of Exeter), Ed Churchwell (University of Wisconsin-
Madison), Chris Lintott (University of Oxford, Adler Planetarium), Sarah Kendrew (Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg), Sarah Maddison (Swinburne University), Matthew
Povich (Pennsylvania State University), Kevin Schawinski (Yale University), Reid Sherman (University of Chicago), Arfon Smith (University of Oxford), Robert Simpson (University of
Oxford), Barbara Whitney (University of Wisconsin and Space Science Institute), Grace Wolf-Chase (Adler Planetarium, University of Chicago) and The Milky Way Project volunteers.
The Milky Way Project is an online citizen science project from
the Zooniverse (Galaxy Zoo, Moon Zoo). The website asks the
public to locate and measure features in Spitzer data from the
GLIMPSE and MIPSGAL surveys. It launched on December 7th
2010 and has already served up 80,000 images.
EXAMPLE OF A STAR CLUSTER IN THE MILKY WAY PROJECT DATA
EXAMPLE OF A GALAXY (LEFT) IN THE MILKY WAY PROJECT DATA
ing any gaps in the bubble’s structure. For other objects, just
EXAMPLE OF THE MILKY WAY PROJECT’S BUBBLE-DRAWING IN- the location and approximate angular size are recorded.
TERFACE ON AN ACTIVE REGION OF THE GALAXY.
The public’s individual drawings of objects, such as bubbles, are
The infrared Spitzer GLIMPSE Survey mapped the midplane of combined and grouped to produce ‘clean’ catalogues. When the
the Milky Way in exquisite detail (Benjamin et al., 2003; project is complete, both the original and cleaned catalogues
Churchwell et al. 2009). Features such as bubbles (HII regions, will be made public. At present there are over 100,000 indi-
supernova remnants - Churchwell et al. 2006; 2007) were ex- vidual bubbles drawings, which reduce down to about 60,000
tracted from these data through visual classification by a hand- when cleaned. If we consider only those instances where more
ful of researchers. The Zooniverse aims to use GLIMPSE/ than 3 individuals agreed that a bubble was present, we have
MIPSGAL data, and soon new GLIMPSE 360 data (Whitney et found approximately 5,000 bubbles.
al. 2009), to produce definitive maps of such structures.
Similarly we have found over 1,000 infrared dark clouds, 596
10,000
compact bubbles, 65 star clusters and 5 galaxies.
8,000
volunteers 6,000
A set of online tools have been developed that allow the public
4,000
to draw the locations and sizes of such objects onto the
GLIMPSE/MIPSGAL data. The Milky Way Project utilizes the
Zooniverse user base of over 370,000 volunteers to produce 2,000
detailed catalogues of bubbles (e.g. Churchwell et al. 2006), star
clusters (e.g. Mercer et al., 2005), stellar bowshocks (e.g. Povich 0
et al. 2008; Kobulnicky, Gilbert and Kiminki 2010), galaxies (e.g. -1.0 -0.8 -0.6 -0.4 -0.2 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0
Marleau et al., 2009) and other objects. It is our aim to pro- FIG 1: DISTRIBUTION OF BUBBLES WITH LATITUDE FOR THE MILKY
duce catalogues of these objects that can be used to guide fu- WAY PROJECT AND THE ORIGINAL CHURCHWELL (2006) STUDY
ture research.
385,000 drawings
Figure 1 shows, in white, the distribution with galactic latitude
for bubbles found during the first four weeks of The Milky Way
Project. Also shown, in orange, are the same data for the bub-
bles founds in the original Bubbling Galactic Disk paper
EXAMPLE OF A BUBBLE IN THE MILKY WAY PROJECT DATA (Churchwell et al,. 2006), normalized to the peak of the fitted
gaussian curve in their Figure 5. So far we have found approxi-
During the first four weeks of the project, 10,000 volunteers mately 10 times as many bubbles, with a similar distribution in
have drawn more than 385,000 bubbles, galaxies, clusters and latitude.
other objects using the site. Volunteers measure the location,
diameter, eccentricity and thickness of bubbles, as well as mark- F I N D U S O N T W I T T E R @ M I L K Y WAY P RO J