The galaxies were found by laboriously combing across thousands of online images kept as part of an online galaxy database. The 'Green peas', as they were so named - were given their unusual description by the way they stuck out to the volunteers as luminous green objects in the images.
The project is made up of volunteers using their home computers in tandem with the 'Galaxy Zoo' project, which shared credit on the important discovery.
New form of galaxies - what are they?
According to a SpaceDaily report, the Green Pea galaxies make up an incredibly dense and compact area of stars. Out of the 1 million galaxies available in the Galaxy Zoo image bank, just 250 green peas were accounted for; the proverbial needle in a haystack theory.
The quick forming galaxies surprised scientists because of their relative size. 10 times smaller than our own Milky Way, the Green Peas are between 1.5 billion and 5 billion light years away from Earth - making the find by the volunteer online group even more impressive.
The stars help tell scientists understand our universe has developed.
Galaxy Zoo: scanning the universe from home
Many of the galaxy scanning volunteers had little or no astronomy background. The Galaxy Zoo project, which has 230,000 volunteers from all over the world, was set up in 2007 by a team of astronomers based in the U.K and U.S.
To date, over 1 million images have been classified by the project using online people power. A follow-up project, Galaxy Zoo 2, was launched in February 2009 and is currently working on finding more galaxy gems in the night skies.
Other online space projects
This isn't the first time a legion of online volunteers have been given the task of checking the night skies. The http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/which launched in 1999, set out to use home computers across the world to unscramble radio waves, in the hope of finding extra terrestrial intelligence across the cosmos.
That mammoth project involved over 180,000 active participants, who volunteered a total of over 290,000 computers to collectively make it the fourth most powerful computer in the world. Unlike the Green Peas discovery, SETI volunteers are yet to stumble upon any conclusive evidence. However, radio source SHGb02+14a is often cited as the closest the project has come to any find of real significance .
