Hi all,

The fourth Galaxy Zoo paper has now been submitted for peer review to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The paper describes a sample of blue early-type galaxies (ellipticals) found by you guys and compares them to their much more common red counterparts. We’ll make the paper available for download as soon as possible. Since the paper contains some interesting results, we would like to wait until we get the first referee report before making the draft available to the community.

In the meantime, have a look at the footnote on page 1:

Now we have to wait for MNRAS to send the paper to a referee and await her/his report.

In other news, we’ve gotten back the referee report for the second paper (Lintott et al.), which has been very kind and we’re currently discussing the revised version. Hopefully that’ll mean that the second Galaxy Zoo paper will be accepted soon!

Great news, Hanny’s Voorwerp, the mystery blob found by Hanny, has made it to Astronomy Picture of the Day!

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap080625.html

This is a fabulous success for all of us as the Voorwerp continues to intrigue…

This is now the second time that Galaxy Zoo got slashdotted. Hooray!

http://science.slashdot.org/science/08/06/22/1757215.shtml

As you can see, we woke up this morning, to find that the Space Telescope Science Institute – the organisation running the world’s most famous telescope, Hubble — have sent out their approval and denial letters for the next cycle of observations with the Telescope. Our proposal for observing the Voorwerp (led by Principal Investigator Bill Keel) was approved for 7 orbits. Getting time on HST is hard at the best of times, and this time round was particularly difficult. Hubble is currently waiting for a visit from astronauts to carry out a desperately needed set of repairs and upgrades, and every astronomer in the world wanted to be first in the queue once it’s back on top form. To give you an idea, more than 20,000 orbits were requested when there were only 3,500 of them to go round - and 7 of them now belong to Galaxy Zoo.

So when will you see a gorgeous Hubble image of the Voorwerp? Not for a while yet. First, the Space Shuttle has to successfully complete its final service mission to repair the Hubble and install new instruments. This is currently scheduled for October 8, 2008. After all the repairs are done and the spacecraft has been checked out thoroughly, we then have to wait for the Voorwerp to actually be visible on the sky for Hubble. All this will take at least several months more. And of course once the data is taken, we then have to reduce it first to produce a picture. Still, it will be a wonderful opportunity for us to learn more about what the Voorwerp is.

By coincidence, today’s the birthday of the Voorwerp’s discover. Happy birthday, Hanny - and enjoy your present from the Space Telescope Science Institute.

Late last year we hinted at a surprise present for you. We also asked you for your name if you didn’t mind it being published…

Well, here you are:

No journal would allow us to have an author list with more than 100.000 names on it. However, you are our collaborators and we wanted to acknowledge your contributions that made Galaxy Zoo possible. If you look at the first page of Kate’s accepted paper, you will see that we link to this page:

All papers that the Team are working on will have this link on them to acknowledge you. In the future, when we make the Galaxy Zoo data available publicly for other astronomers to use, we’ll also ask them to do the same when they publish their results.

So once again, a Big Thanks from the Team. You can download a full-resolution JPEG or PDF version of the poster at http://www.galaxyzoo.org/Volunteers.aspx.