By Hamish Johnston
In 2007 a group of astronomers launched Galaxy Zoo with the aim of harnessing people power to classify galaxies.
The idea is that the general public would scan telescope images of galaxies and classify their shapes. Astronomers simply don’t have the time to analyse the hundreds of thousands of galaxy images that are gathered robotically and Galaxy Zoo was a great success.
The Galaxy Zoo team launched several more projects including Galaxy Zoo: The Hunt for Supernovae, which enlists the public in the search for exploding stars.
Now, Galaxy Zoo has published its first scientific paper on supernovae. Nearly 14,000 supernova candidates were classified by more than 2500 individuals within a few hours of data collection.
You can read all about the results here.