Looking for Strange Galaxies

Galaxies come in many shapes and sizes, but a small fraction look truly peculiar. These unusual systems—distorted, asymmetric, or trailing long streams of material—often record the most dramatic moments in the life of a galaxy. They are witnesses to powerful events such as collisions, gravitational encounters, and gas stripping inside dense galaxy clusters.

In this project, we explore images from the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) to identify galaxies that defy the ordinary. By recognizing features like double cores, extended tidal tails, or one-sided “jellyfish”-like streams, we can trace how galaxies interact with their surroundings and how those interactions drive their evolution. Each disturbed or oddly shaped galaxy helps us understand how galaxies grow, merge, and sometimes lose their gas when falling into clusters.

Your classifications will help astronomers better understand the process that sculpt galaxies across cosmic time—and showing that in the Universe, the most different ones often have the best stories to tell.

This project is led by an international team of astronomers in different institutions, mostly based in Chile, brought together by the Millennium Nucleus for Galaxies (MINGAL). Follow us on social media.