The Galaxy Zoo AGN host galaxies paper is nearing the final draft stage.

Note to self: when converting a document from British to American spelling, do not just automatically replace all instances of `ise’ with `ize!’

I’m delighted to announce that the fifth Galaxy Zoo paper – the one that discusses Hanny’s Voorwerp – has now been accepted for publication by Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

It’s somewhat of a relief to say that, as it was way back in August of last year that we first submitted it. The referee was extremely thorough, catching a few stupid mistakes we’d made (as a good referee should) and in correcting these and responding to responses for clarification the paper grew from four pages to thirteen. The basic story is still the one that Bill and I outlined more than a year ago – we think we’re seeing the result of activity associated with the black hole in the nearby galaxy IC2497 which has now ceased.

Along the way, another team of astronomers have published a paper about their radio observations of the Voorwerp; I’ll blog later in the week about how we think the two sets of observations are compatible. Hopefully they’ll do the same, and we can have a discussion in public about what we do – and don’t – agree on. By coincidence, their paper is being published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics this week – and their image of the Voorwerp made the front cover of the printed edition. We’ll have an image of that for you as soon as anyone involved can find a printed edition – a rare thing in this internet age.

Update : Paper is now available here.

P.S. For those keeping score, our Voorwerp paper was the 5th to be submitted, but the 6th to be accepted.

Update: The pre-print is available on astro-ph now.

A group of young cosmology researchers at the University of Portsmouth (where a number of Zoo people work) are trying to start a video podcast outreach project. The working title is “Our Universe” and the idea is that these would be short video podcasts, probably released on You Tube which will give some insight into how cosmologists/astronomers work as well as answer some basic questions about the science. I’ve seen a rough draft of the “pilot episode” and it’s quite fun.

One idea is that each episode would include short (ideally around 10 seconds) video or audio clips from members of the public asking questions of scientists. These can be questions about the science, or about their jobs, or whatever you want really. We were hoping that some Zooites reading this blog might be interested in helping out with this as a test run – and you might get to appear in one of the early episodes if it all works out. Be warned – if the clip is too long it’s much less likely to be useful. Short and to the point questions are what’s needed here.

So if you have a burning question to ask a cosmologist and you have the ability to make a short video (with a webcam for example) or audio clip (plus accompanying picture) of yourself asking this question that would be great. For now we’ll use the University of Portsmouth Web Shelf to share the files – if you upload something post a comment here with the URL and I’ll grab it (don’t worry it’ll expire a week after you upload it).

Thanks in advance for your help, Karen.

When you start to write a paper for publication, you generally think that it will take a fortnight, at most. Naturally, that’s almost always a highly optimistic estimate and it can take months to get a paper into shape for submission to a journal. 

I’m currently working on the Galaxy Zoo paper dealing with the host galaxies of AGN (active galactic nuclei – accreting supermassive black holes). Your classifications from Zoo1 are making it possible for us to look at AGN host galaxies in a completely new light and, in particular, see how they’re different from galaxies whose black holes aren’t accreting at the moment. The diagrams and plots are done and the text is now mostly there (10,000 words and counting!), but some of the crucial sections are still very much in the draft stage.

I’ve circulated two earlier drafts with the team to get their comments and suggestions and I’ve mostly finished incorporating them into the text. However, as am writing up the part of the paper where I’m trying to explain what it all means, it’s becoming clear that there’s a lot that the morphologies that your classifications made possible are telling us that’s new and, to be honest, quite mystifying. 

That means that I will still have to do some more writing, thinking and discussing with experts on our team on various aspects, all of which of course take time. I started work on this paper in the autumn of 2008, and I’m still working on it.  So you can see that getting a scientific paper from an idea to something you can submit can take quite a long time, especially when you start finding things you didn’t expect. And of course, once the paper is finished and submitted to a journal, the process of peer-review begins, which in turn can take weeks, months, or even years.

Now that spring classes are over, I’m catching up with lots of things. These include making color-composite images from our latest observations at the WIYN 3.5-meter telescope in Arizona done to follow up overlapping-galaxy pairs from the Forum. Here are three samples, showing how much more detail we can see with long exposures one the objects have been found from the SDSS data. In SDSS J215311.30-073533.5, the WIYN images show just the kind of thing we’re looking for – dust in spiral arms silhouetted against the light of the background galaxy. First here is the SDSS image, then the WIYN picture below it.

SDSS 2153-07 WIYN image

The AAS meeting just ended, and in a few minutes I’ll be giving Lucy from the Zoo Education Team a ride to Caltech, which is just down the street. Georgia sent me some photos from the three Galaxy Zoo education posters that we presented here.

Here is my poster, describing the irregular galaxies project:

Here is Pamela’s poster describing the results of our survey into the reasons you participate in Galaxy Zoo:

And, last but not least, here is Georgia’s poster describing our plans for future user testing of the Zoo 2 website:

It was a very successful meeting, and a lot of people came by the poster to ask questions or share their own results.

I’m headed back home at 11 PM tonight. It’s been a great trip, but I’m looking forward to going home!

The International Year of Astronomy citizen science session at AAS is going on *right now*! Pamela’s team is live-streaming the session. You can see it at http://tinyurl.com/mmm5n4 .

11:08 AM: Pamela: “Galaxy Zoo takes long collaborator lists to a whole new level.” She’s showing a small sample of all the names from the Zoo 1 poster. Next, she’s talking about Zoo 2, and telling the story of 100 hours of astronomy challenge – 1 million galaxies in 100 hours. We thought this was an ambitious goal, but you did 2.6 million!

11:09 AM: “We now have a group of volunteers larger than the Italian Army.” Chris leaned over to me and says, “We need to update that, so we can figure out who we can invade now.” 🙂

11:11 AM: Now she’s revealing the research result – it’s the “Old Galaxies Spin in Sync” discovery that Raul Jimenez posted about yesterday. Read Raul’s post for more about that. I couldn’t reveal the result before now because there was a press embargo. Pamela is now emphasizing that star formation history is the *only* thing that matches up with galaxy spin direction.

11:13 AM: In addition to Raul’s spin result, Pamela is talking about the discoveries that are coming out of Daniel’s mergers research. She’s showing a picture of mergers divided up by your confidence of how likely it was that it was truly a merger. The biggest discovery from your merger classifications is that about 1-3% of galaxies are undergoing major mergers. Pamela: “this work would not have been possible without the participation of large numbers of Zooites.” Great job, everyone – you made this press conference possible!

11:16 AM: Now it’s question time from reporters – I’ll try to record the Zoo-related questions and answers.

11:19 AM: Question: “What’s the correlation between different Zoo members in terms of classification?” Answer: We were able to build separate samples based on agreement between Zooites, called “clean,” “cleanest,” and “superclean,” based on agreement between 60%, 80%, and 95% of Zooites.

11:24 AM: Question: “How do you account for human bias when classifying clockwise and counterclockwise spirals?” Answer: When we first noticed an extra amount of counterclockwise galaxies, we mirrored images of the galaxies. When you classified the mirrored images, you found the same excess of counterclockwise galaxies, showing that it’s a human bias rather than something strange about the universe. Now that we know about the bias, we correct for it.

That’s the end of the press conference. Later today, I’ll go back and add some links to these posts for more information. Do any of you have any questions about anything that was said here?