Writing the Peas paper has been a great experience for me. I’m still new to the process; its only my 3rd paper and my first with Galaxy Zoo. Kevin and Jordan suggested that I use my experience here to talk a little bit about the process of writing a paper. Every time a paper is written the stages you go through can vary, but I’ll try to describe what we’ve been doing with the Peas paper over the last year. This is a separate perspective from the one Alice is putting together giving the history of the Peas on the Galaxy Zoo Forum.

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Sometimes in scientific research opportunities collide and lead to rather busy days. Yesterday I had such a day, and since it involved me giving two presentations about Galaxy Zoo I thought you might be interested to hear about it.

In the morning I gave a talk “Galaxy Evolution in the Galaxy Zoo”  at the “Unity of the Universe” conference in Portsmouth, a conference celebrating the opening of the new Dennis Sciama Building for the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation (ICG, where I and several other “Zoo Keepers” work). This talk was aimed at summarizing for astronomers and cosmologists at the meeting the exciting results on galaxy evolution which have come out of Galaxy Zoo. Many researchers in astronomy are aware of Galaxy Zoo, and in general are very interested in it, but they tend to think of it more an an opportunity for outreach with the interested general public and less in terms of the exciting science which can come out of it. The point of my talk was to say that it should in fact be viewed as both. It seemed to go over well.

Over lunch I took a train to London where in the afternoon I was interviewed by an esteemed panel of scientists (including Baroness Susan Greenfield, Director of the Royal Institution, and Prof. Alec Boksenberg, Chair of the UK National Commission for UNESCO). This interview was because I was a finalist in the competition for the 2009 L’Oreal UNESCO UK/Ireland Fellowships for Women in Science. My proposal for this fellowship (for £15000) was to extend my period of study at Portsmouth so I could spend more time studying the red spirals in Galaxy Zoo (among other things). I gave a 10 minute talk about this proposed research, then answered questions from the panel.

Later that afternoon I had a L’Oreal makeover (really - but don’t worry this was not a requirement for the fellowship just a treat, and a positive sign in my opinion of a recognition that scientists can want to be feminine) and in the evening I attended a reception at the Royal Institution at which the winners of the fellowship were announced. Unfortunately I did not win the competition, but as I did make the final 8 (out of 240 applicants) I can’t feel too bad about it. I also got a nice engraved pen, met some very interesting people, and I’m assured I can still expect some free makeup. So that’s not too bad after all!

Quite a busy day in the life of an astronomer!

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We are happy to announce that our paper, “Galaxy Zoo: Disentangling the Environmental Dependence of Morphology and Colour”, has been accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the RAS. We showed that much, but not all, of the correlation between a galaxy’s morphology and its large-scale environment can be explained by the correlation between galaxy colour and environment. We also showed that, among red galaxies, galaxies classified as ellipticals are more likely to be located in the central regions of galaxy groups and clusters. Finally, we argued that a relatively large fraction of red spiral galaxies are “satellite” galaxies in groups.

The pre-print of the accepted paper is available on astro-ph.

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Alice Sheppard has had various jobs in administration, environment, teaching and writing whenever she can - but as soon as she started moderating the Galaxy Zoo Forum nearly 2 years ago, she knew that this was her real work. She’d been hooked on astronomy and science since she was very young, but the presentation of these subjects at school didn’t encourage her to think she’d ever really get involved. She studied Environmental Science at university in Norwich and Granada, Spain, and became increasingly interested in informing and involving the public. She now lives in Pembrokeshire, Wales, with her family and two cats who also contributed to scientific research for April Fool’s Day! Her involvement in the Galaxy Zoo project inspired her to start an Open University course and her current goal is to continue the work she has begun informally in the Galaxy Zoo project as a science communicator and educator. You can catch up more with Alice on her blog: Alice in Galaxyland, and she invites you to join her any time for virtual coffee and galaxy conversations in the forum.

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