The Galaxy Zoo science team proposed an International Team project with the goal of collecting, processing and making available to the community Galaxy Zoo classifications for public, multi-filter JWST NIRCam imaging of resolved galaxies. We have several specific science cases, but more importantly will enable the creation of a homogeneous quantitative visual morphology catalog of wide benefit to the extragalactic community making use of JWST imaging for years to come.
- ISSI Meeting 1: April 15-19th 2024
- ISSI Meeting 2: March 17-21st 2025
In advance of our first meeting, we launched a pilot project at Galaxy Zoo with around 8000 images from JWST:CEERS (one of the JWST galaxy surveys). At the meeting we spent time analyzing these classifications to consider/discuss changes needed for a larger launch. We also worked on papers using the CEERs based classifications, and two finished scientific papers came out of this work:
- Smethurst et al. 2025: “Galaxy Zoo JWST: up to 75 per cent of discs are featureless at 3 < z < 7” where we investigate an interesting sample of galaxies which are rotating discs (based on their surface brightness profiles), but show no visible features (spirals, bars etc) despite the images having the necessary resolution and depth to see them.
- Geron et al. submitted (available on arxiv): “Galaxy Zoo CEERS: Bar fractions up to z~4.0”
We also continue to work on
- “GZ: CEERS – How well does the Traditional Galaxy Zoo Classification Tree Work at High Redshift”, a paper intended to be the data release for the CEERS classifications and look at statistics of what fraction of the galaxy population at these redshifts fit on the classification tree.
At our second meeting, we focused on collecting images from other JWST surveys. Realising that the COSMOSweb survey contained 80% of the remaining images of galaxies classifiable by Galaxy Zoo, we focused on generating colour image cutouts, and deciding on target selection of ~300,000 galaxies in that survey. Following the work done at this meeting, a “Galaxy Zoo: JWST” relaunch happened April 29th 2025 with some press from NASA (as we join the “NASA Citizen Science” family ) and the Zooniverse. At the time of writing (Jun 2025) is anticipated that it will take roughly a year for classifications to be collected for this set of images.