If you want to draw bubbles in the name of science and for a better understanding of this galaxy, go to The Milky Way Project to sign up.  Although you may want to read about the January 17, 2012 article by Paul Scott Anderson for physorg.com (originally published in Universe Today) for a better description than the project website offers,

Remember when you were a kid and blowing bubbles was such great fun? Well, stars kind of do that too. The “bubbles” are partial or complete rings of dust and gas that occur around young stars in active star-forming regions, known as stellar nurseries. So far, over 5,000 bubbles have been found, but there are many more out there awaiting discovery. Now there is a project that you can take part in yourself, to help find more of these intriguing objects.

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They have been seen before, but now the task is to find as many as possible in the newer, high-resolution images from Spitzer [a space telescope]. A previous catalogue of star bubbles in 2007 listed 269 of them. Four other researchers had found about 600 of them in 2006. Now they are being found by the thousands. As of now, the new catalogue lists 5,106 bubbles, after looking at almost half a million images so far. As it turns out, humans are more skilled at identifying them in the images than a computer algorithm would be. People are better at pattern recognition and then making a judgment based on the data as to what actually is a bubble and what isn’t.

There are more details about The Milky Way Project in Anderson’s article which mentions the Zooniverse in passing. I was surprised to find out that (from the Zooniverse About page),

The Zooniverse is home to the internet’s largest, most popular and most successful citizen science projects. …

The Zooniverse began with a single project, Galaxy Zoo , which was launched in July 2007. The Galaxy Zoo team had expected a fairly quiet life, but were overwhelmed and overawed by the response to the project. Once they’d recovered from their server buckling under the strain, they set about planning the future!

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The Zooniverse and the suite of projects it contains is produced, maintained and developed by the Citizen Science Alliance. The member institutions of the CSA work with many academic and other partners around the world to produce projects that use the efforts and ability of volunteers to help scientists and researchers deal with the flood of data that confronts them.

As for the Citizen Science Alliance (CSA) group mentioned in About Zooniverse, here’s a description from their home page,

“ The CSA is a collaboration of scientists, software developers and educators who collectively develop, manage and utilise internet-based citizen science projects in order to further science itself, and the public understanding of both science and of the scientific process. These projects use the time, abilities and energies of a distributed community of citizen scientists who are our collaborators ”

The CSA takes proposals and the next selection round will be in February 2012. From the CSA’s proposal page,

Thanks to generous support from the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, Adler Planetarium and the Citizen Science Alliance are pleased to announce the first open call for proposals by researchers who wish to develop citizen science projects which take advantage of the experience, tools and community of the Zooniverse. Successful proposals will receive donated effort of the Adler-based team to build and launch a new citizen science project.

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Proposals are welcomed from scientists or researchers in any discipline that would significantly benefit from the active participation of tens or hundreds of thousands of volunteers. Building on the success of our existing projects, including Galaxy Zoo, Planet Hunters and Old Weather, successful proposals will be designed in partnership with the applicants, then implemented and hosted by the Zooniverse team. The applicants will therefore be free to concentrate on making good use of the work of volunteers for the benefit of their research.

We expect proposals to be made by a team who can take responsibility for defining the initial research problem, data set to be used, and who are committed to making use of the results.

They do recommend submitting your proposal by Jan. 15 by the latest which means this is a bit late but maybe next year, eh?

As for the champagne headline, thank you to Eli Bressert who compared the galaxy to champagne with all its bubbles (in Paul Scott Anderson’s article).