Why Scientists Need You

The Milky Way Project is currently working with data taken from the Galactic Legacy Infrared Mid-Plane Survey Extraordinaire (GLIMPSE) and the Multiband Imaging Photometer for Spitzer Galactic Plane Survey (MIPSGAL). We aim to bring you a host of interesting science problems as time goes by, and to begin with we're looking for bubbles. These bubbles are part of the life cycle of stars. Some bubbles have already been found - by the study that inspired this project - but we want to find more! By finding more, we will build up a comprehensive view of not only these bubbles, but our galaxy as a whole. We're asking you to help us map star formation in our galaxy.

So how can you help? Using our bubble-drawing interface, our hope is that you will find bubbles and note any important or unusual characteristics. For example, if you can see what looks like a knot in the bubble, flag it! This knot might tell us something about how the bubble is affecting star formation in the region. If you see a star cluster, flag it! We hope to map the location of these clusters - many of which have not been located before.

As well as bubbles, knots and stars clusters there are other objects hidden throughout these images such as young stars, supernova remnants and never-before-seen galaxies. If you see anything unusual in the images, make sure to mark it using the 'areas' tool. We hope to map out these objects and then use your discoveries to make more observations. You might even discover something we didn't expect.

Bubbles and Dust

Imagine holding a single grain of sand in your hand. Pretty small, right? Now shrink that grain of sand tenfold. This is roughly how big interstellar dust particles are. Yet this incredibly tiny piece of material exists in such huge quantity in the Universe, that it has huge consequences. Dust one-tenth the size of a grain of sand is one of the key players in the process of star formation. Massive clouds of dust and gas are what collapse to begin to form stars.

The trouble is that this dust, composed of tiny silicon particles, is behaving in unexpected ways. It appears to be able to survive near hot, massive OB stars, when the interstellar winds and radiation pressure should force this usually cold dust to heat up and scatter. Bubbles are interesting places - they are 'holes' in our understanding of star formation.

The answer might be found in examining partial and closed rings - bubbles - that exist in the galaxy, and this is one of the aims of the Milky Way Project. By looking at bubbles in our galaxy, the Milky Way, we hope to get a better understanding of star formation, which can in turn help us understand these mysterious characteristics of the dust that is so important in creating stars.

How is it that we know the bubbles indicate sites of active star formation? Because bubbles are made by hot stars, and hot stars are generally found dominating clusters containing several hundred to several thousand low-mass stars apiece! Hot stars also don't live long enough to move far from the clouds where they formed. All this means that each bubble represents several hundred to several thousand very young stars.

The bubbles you see in this project are sometimes complete, and round, but often not. There are a great many bubbles that look like they have burst or faded away - or been disrupted by other bubbles. You can help us in this area by identifying bursting or distorted bubbles and figuring out the angle at which they burst or the eccentricity of their shape. This information will allow us to reconstruct bubbles to see how it evolved and grew. Maybe the bubble ran out of material, or maybe there is something stranger afoot!

2012 Update

Thanks to the contributions of tens of thousands of you, the Milky Way Project has been very successful at finding bubbles. Our 2012 paper, outlining our first official data release, explains how you have visually identified 5,106 bubbles in the Milky Way. This is ten times the previous best list.

As the project goes along we find less new bubbles but learn more about the existing ones. In early 2012 we decided to update the site and change the images we use. Instead of serving up random areas of the sky, we now show volunteers images where we think there are bubbles, based on the work the community has done up to now. This will enable us to better measure and define the catalogue and improve the catalogue.

A prominent bubble. This bright bubble is one of the easier ones that need to be measured. Although computers can do an ok job: people are much better.

Stars appear blue in these images and cooler material appears red. This image does not contain any obvious bubbles, but there may be one on the edge of the brighter region. The human eye is excellent at picking out such features.

Some images contain lots of bubbles on many different size scales.

There are many well-known features to be spotted in the Milky Way Project. Here you can see the Eagle Nebula (M16), which features in a famous Hubble image called 'the pillars of creation'.

In very complex areas, people become much better than computers at picking out structures. We are looking for circles or ellipses - sometime broken or slightly distorted. There are many to be found in this image upon closer inspection.

In active regions, there may be bubbles that are giving way to more bubbles on their edges. The science team behind the Milky Way Project are especially interested in these areas as they may tells us how one set of of stars affects the formation of other stars - or even starts the process off!