During the main run of Clump Scout (September 2019 - February 2021), we had over 14,000 volunteers examine nearly 60,000 galaxies in total. Of these galaxies, we found clumps in over 7,000!

This catalog of clumps has been extremely interesting so far. In particular, a few things set it apart from past work in the field:

• First, it is the only clump catalog of its size in which human eyes identified all of the clumps. While some automated methods do exist to identify clumps, they are still improving; human classifications are our best tool for improving them.
• Second, it is by far the largest clump catalog of its kind covering nearby galaxies. Most large catalogs have focused on the distant universe. The light from very distant galaxies can take billions of years to reach us, so we effectively see these galaxies as they existed billions of years in the past. Thanks to past surveys, we know that these distant, early-universe galaxies appear to be overflowing with clumps -- but for a long time, we did not have a similarly detailed picture of clumps in nearby, modern galaxies. This is why Clump Scout set out to search nearby galaxies for clumps.

Below, you can take a look at 12 example galaxies from our 7,000, with the clumps that volunteers identified marked in red.

Published results

Press conference: In January of 2022, we presented our first science result at a press conference hosted by the American Astronomical Society. There, we provided an ~8 minute explanation of what Clump Scout is and what it's told us so far about how galaxies have evolved over the last 5-10 billion years. You can watch on YouTube at this link.

Our first paper, "Galaxy Zoo: Clump Scout: Surveying the local universe for giant star-forming clumps," is available for open access on ArXiv at https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.06581