A key factor leading to the creation of the project was the problem of what has been referred to as data deluge, where research produces vast sets of information to the extent that research teams are not able to analyse and process much of it. Kevin Schawinski, previously an astrophysicist at Oxford University and co-founder of Galaxy Zoo, described the problem that led to Galaxy Zoo's creation when he was set the task of classifying the morphology of more than 900,000 galaxies by eye that had been imaged by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, USA. "I classified 50,000 galaxies myself in a week, it was mind-numbing." Chris Lintott, a co-founder of the project and a professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford, stated: "In many parts of science, we're not constrained by what data we can get, we're constrained by what we can do with the data we have. Citizen science is a very powerful way of solving that problem."