Thanks to forum user milk_n_cookies for finding an appropriate galaxy for the holiday – the Turkey Galaxy:

(the legs are to the top left – click for a larger view)

Here is the Sloan Digital Sky Survey data for The Turkey Galaxy (official name SDSS J033009.27-011137.2).

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you, around the world – we are thankful for all the time you have shared with us as we have explored the universe together!

We have issued a press release describing the exciting simultaneous discovery of a significant population of red spiral galaxies by both the Galaxy Zoo and Space Telescope A901/902 Galaxy Evolution Survey (STAGES) projects. These unusual galaxies are found mainly in the outskirts of galaxy groups and clusters, and appear to be a missing link in the transformation of normal star-forming spirals to ‘red and dead’ early-types (lenticulars and ellipticals) in dense environments.You can see the press release here, and see the news on the BBC, and Wired. 

Hot on the heels of the acceptance of our initial paper looking at the environmental dependence of morphology and colour, here’s another one considering similar questions, but using a very different approach.

The first author is Ramin Skibba, a friend of the Galaxy Zoo team, who is an expert in a mysterious analysis tool called ‘mark correlation functions’. He’s calculated these using the Galaxy Zoo data and interpreted the results to help us understand how the morphology and colour of galaxies depend on their environment. This has confirmed many of the findings in our previous paper, and given us new insight into the processes responsible for transforming galaxies from blue to red and spiral to elliptical. Ramin will write a blog post, explaining his paper in more detail, soon.

The paper has just been submitted to our usual journal of choice, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The submitted version will be available later in the week; we’ll post more then.

(For those counting, this is the 7th Galaxy Zoo paper to be submitted. So far, four have been accepted and we’re still working on the other two).

The wheels of science sometimes seem to turn very slowly. It was back in May when, after several months of work, we submitted a paper which investigates how the morphology and colour of galaxies varies depending on where in the universe they live. Earlier this week, exactly six months later, the paper was finally accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS).Along the way we have added a number of improvements requested during peer review, and others which were suggested to us by colleagues or we thought of after submission. The paper will now be sent to the publisher for typesetting, and should appear online before the end of the year (after we’ve given it a final proof read), and in print shortly after that.We wanted people to know about our work as soon as possible, both the Galaxy Zoo users and fellow astronomers, so we put the paper on a public scientific archive at the same time as submitting to the journal. We have updated that version to match the one which will appear in MNRAS. If you are feeling adventurous, you can get it here. A more approachable summary of the results can be found on this poster.

So why has it taken so long? Well, it hasn’t really. It usually takes at least a couple of months for a paper to go through the peer review process, and often longer for a lengthy paper like this one. This process involves the selection of an independent reviewer by the journal, who usually remains anonymous. They carefully read the paper and provide suggestions for changes to be made before publication. As the reviewer is usually very busy doing their own science, it generally takes a month before the reviewer sends their report. The authors then usually revise their paper based on the reviewer’s comments, and reply to the referee giving additional explanation and justification for any suggestions which were not acted upon. This exchange sometimes repeats a few times. If the reviewer recommends many changes, which take the authors a long time to get around to doing, a paper may spend over a year in review!

One unfortunate delay for our paper was that the first reviewer was rather more rigourously technical than most astronomers, and took a dislike to our slightly casual use of terms such as ‘independent’ in our title and abstract (the brief summary of the paper). This reviewer wanted us, unreasonably we believe, to rewrite our paper before they were willing to actually read it. Sometimes it happens that there is a mismatch between the paper’s intended readership and the chosen reviewer. We therefore asked the journal for a second opinion, to which they kindly agreed. The second reviewer was much more positive, and gave very useful suggestions for minor changes that have helped to improve the paper. We also made quite a few small changes that we had thought of while the paper was in review, and even tried to make the first referee happy by changing the title slightly. We are really happy with the resulting paper, but glad to have it finished with, so we can now concentrate on all the other exciting work we are doing. Stay posted!

We’re halfway through our second observing run to follow up overlapping-galaxy pairs (and it is still a lot warmer than that picture from Spain looks in the last blog entry!) . Anna and I arrived yesterday at Kitt Peak National Observatory southwest of Tucson, Arizona. She got here at lunchtime, and I didn’t make it until just after sunset because of a committee meeting in town. We’re using the 3.5-meter WIYN telescope (Wisconsin-Indiana-Yale-NOAO – it takes more than a village to build an observatory!), located at Kitt Peak National Observatory. As we did last April, we’re using a camera called OPTIC, which can be temperamental in the software and networking departments but can deliver very sharp images through tracking of atmospheric image motions right on the chip during an exposure. We’ve gotten several images as sharp as 0.5 arcseconds, which is not much bigger than a single SDSS image pixel. The combination of a larger telescope and much longer exposures let us measure features that the SDSS survey images only hint at.

Read More…

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.