More good news for the Zoo arrived this week. As Bill prepares for our next observing run on top on Kitt Peak in Arizona, we received an email that we’ve been awarded time on the giant 30m radio dish of the IRAM observatory above Granada for not one, but two Zoo projects.  The first is the beginning of our campaign to make use of the beautiful catalogue of merging galaxies the Zoo provides, led by Daniel Darg here in Oxford. The second is the project the Zoo was originally designed for, teasing out the effect of black holes in star formation in ellipticals. Kevin and I have already had great success doing this with IRAM, but the ability of the Zoo to find nearby blue ellipticals will be of enormous value.

In both cases, we’ll be looking for the signature of carbon monoxide (CO) in the galaxies. That might sound obscure, but CO is actually the second most common molecule in the Universe. The most common is just hydrogen, H2, but that’s hard to detect so instead we go after CO. Once you know how much CO there is, there’s a well-established formula that gives you the star formation rate, something which we need to know if we’re going to understand how the galaxies are evolving.

We’re waiting for the final schedules to be drawn up, but it looks like at least one Zookeeper will be spending New Year up a mountain. Watch this space.

I created the Merger Checking (which now has over a million clicks), three Pea Hunts (All finished) and now an unofficial irregular galaxy classification. What started as 80 lines of Perl code is now 800 (about 50 of the original 80 lines still survive), but can now support almost any Galaxy Zoo mini-project.These mini-projects will never be as pretty as the main GZ sites, but they are quick to build, modify and use.

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A quick followup to last week’s announcement of my talk on the Zoo and Hanny’s Voorwerp - the PDF visuals and MP3 narration are now available online. Truth in advertising compels me to point out that we ended up not being able to record the talk live, so I redid the narration later. As best I can tell, this version was less entertaining than the one for a live audience (as well as being a good bit shorter). You also have to figure out when to page forward…

Just a quick notice that our spin correlations paper was accepted by the Monthly Notices of Royal Astronomical Society (where all Galaxy Zoo papers go)