Hundreds of thousands of volunteers rewrite Hubble's classification of galaxies

Citizen science has led to a dramatic revision of the classification, with implications for galaxy formation.

https://phys.org/news/2019-06-citizen-scientists-re-tune-hubble-galaxy.html

Are you a volunteer Elroch? 

Spiral, barred, elliptical, open, globular... did I miss any type ??? Binary are just star systems, correct??? 

There are what's called "Irregular" types too.  There my be others.  It should be easy enough to check.  

I was a volunteer in that project a long time ago, I think at least 10 years back. I did it for a few months but stopped because I felt my choices were arbitrary too often and that therefore I might be damaging the project with my input. So many galaxies seemed to have just vague suggestions of spiral arms making them unclear whether to be classified as spiral or irregular.

I have been, @opiejames, but only a small contribution.

@Elroch Did you find the criteria for categorizing the galaxies clear enough to feel confident about your classifications, or did you have the same problem that I did?

I accepted that the assumption was that the individual decisions were fuzzy in nature and the large number of people were reducing the noise in a familiar way. It is common that when people estimate things imprecisely, the combination of their guesses provides much greater precision.

Yes, I should have accepted that too and persevered.

I have to say it was a rather mind-numbing task. I guess you'd agree with that? I'd probably have dropped out anyway.

This is true.  I saw an experiment where 20 people guessed how many jelly beans were is a jar.  The average of the guesses was very close and better than any individual guess.  

Weird I thought open clusters were considered irregular galaxies 🤔  🌌 🤔 

As I understand it, open clusters are not galaxies at all but groupings of stars within a galaxy. Open clusters within our own galaxy can be confused with galaxies when we observe them.

Hmm, makes sense 

Is that like Galaxy Zoo?  I used to help with that until I realised it might help humanity find aliens and if we contact them they could wipe us out easily.

I don't want to start a rabbit trail here, but I have to comment that I don't believe there is advanced life (defined as at least some in the species are capable of learning and playing a fairly good game of chess)  out there.  I can defend that statement, but this isn't the place.