Try Your Hand At Galaxy Zoo's New "Slot Machine"

Here's your chance to play online slot machines without risking your life savings. Plus it's an opportunity to contribute to a citizen science project that is sure to revolutionize our understanding of galaxy mergers. Galaxy Zoo's newest project asks for help in looking at colliding galaxies, and uses a tool akin to a cosmic slot machine to compare images of galactic pile-ups with millions of simulated mergers.

"The analogy I've been using is that it is like driving past a car crash," said Galaxy Zoo team member Chris Lintott from Oxford University. "You get a snapshot of the action, but there are two things you want to know: what caused the crash (or what did things look like before it all went wrong), and you want to know what the outcome is going to be. We're doing the same thing. We want to know what the galaxies looked like before the mergers started disrupting them, and we want to know how they are going to end up. Just like our other Galaxy Zoo projects, humans are much better at doing this than computers, and lots of humans are even better."
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