---
title: "Radio Galaxy Zoo"
chunk: 1/3
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Galaxy_Zoo"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:15:44.023207+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Radio Galaxy Zoo (RGZ) is an internet crowdsourced citizen science project that seeks to locate supermassive black holes in distant galaxies. It is hosted by the web portal Zooniverse. The scientific team want to identify black hole/jet pairs and associate them with the host galaxies. Using a large number of classifications provided by citizen scientists they hope to build a more complete picture of black holes at various stages and their origin. It was initiated in 2010 by Ray Norris in collaboration with the Zooniverse team, and was driven by the need to cross-identify the millions of extragalactic radio sources that will be discovered by the forthcoming Evolutionary Map of the Universe survey.  RGZ is now led by scientists Julie Banfield and Ivy Wong. RGZ started operations on 17 December 2013, and ceased collecting new classifications on 1 May 2019.

== RGZ data sources ==

The project's scientific team are drawn mostly from Australia, with support from Zooniverse developers and other institutions. They use data taken by the Faint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty-Centimeters (FIRST) survey which was observed at the Very Large Array between 1993 and 2011. Also used was data from the Australia Telescope Large Area Survey (ATLAS), taken with the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) in rural New South Wales. The infrared astronomy used was observed by Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and the Spitzer Space Telescope.

== RGZ publications ==

RGZ has published five scientific studies (May 2018).
i) Radio Galaxy Zoo: host galaxies and radio morphologies derived from visual inspection. (November 2015)
The abstract begins: "We present results from the first twelve months of operation of Radio Galaxy Zoo, which upon completion will enable visual inspection of over 170,000 radio sources to determine the host galaxy of the radio emission and the radio morphology." It then explains that RGZ "uses 1.4GHz radio images from both the Faint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty Centimeters (FIRST) and the Australia Telescope Large Area Survey (ATLAS) in combination with mid-infrared images at 3.4μm from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and at 3.6μm from the Spitzer Space Telescope." Its aims are that when complete, RGZ will measure the relative populations and properties of host galaxies; processes that might also provide an avenue for finding radio structures that are rare and extreme.
On the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) website, an article from September 2015 named "Volunteer black hole hunters as good as the experts" explains how citizen scientists are as good as professionals at RGZ's tasks. The research team tested trained citizen scientists and ten professional astronomers using a hundred images to help quantify the quality of the data gathered. As the initial results were published, facts and figures from RGZ became available. More than 1.2 million radio images have been looked at, which enabled 60,000 radio sources to be matched to their host galaxies: "A feat that would have taken a single astronomer working 40 hours a week roughly 50 years to complete."