Back in March I was speaking to a colleague of mine in Nottingham, Seb Foucaud, about the Galaxy Zoo Peas, and showing him Carie’s paper. Seb works primarily on very distant (high redshift) massive galaxies, often using data from the UKIDSS Ultra Deep Survey. He quickly noticed that the way Carie selected Peas from SDSS data was very similar to the way they select high redshift galaxies, except that the exact colours used were different, as more distant galaxies are redder.

Read more

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

A couple of members of the Galaxy Zoo team were in Malaysia over the last week at this conference, organised by the University of Nottingham:

On Friday morning Steven and Ramin gave talks featuring our results on how galaxy morphology changes depending on the environment where a galaxy lives, how that affect varies with how massive a galaxy is, and comparing with what we see in terms of galaxy colours. Galaxy Zoo’s clear indication that there is an important population of red spirals in dense environments tied in very well with the theme of the conference and the discussion we’ve had over the past week. Both talks were well received - everyone is really interested in the things we can do with the fabulous dataset you’ve all helped to produce.  Our recent startling discovery also received a brief mention!

We’ve featured all this work on the blog before. You can read about it here, here and here.

Everyone agrees that it’s been a really excellent conference, full of interesting talks and useful discussions, and a very enjoyable social side too. We’re already looking forward to the next!

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

This morning the latest paper from Galaxy Zoo appeared on astro-ph — “Galaxy Zoo: an unusual new class of galaxy cluster”. Authored by two of the Galaxy Zoo team’s newest recruits, Marven F. Pedbost and Trillean Pomalgu, this four-page paper presents a remarkable new discovery, which may require us to revise our fundamental ideas about either our place in the universe or the occurrence of unlikely events. The abstract gives a concise summary:

We have identified a new class of galaxy cluster using data from the Galaxy Zoo project. These clusters are rare, and thus have apparently gone unnoticed before, despite their unusual properties. They appear especially anomalous when the morphological properties of their component galaxies are considered. Their identification therefore depends upon the visual inspection of large numbers of galaxies, a feat which has only recently been made possible by Galaxy Zoo, together with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We present the basic properties of our cluster sample, and discuss possible formation scenarios and implications for cosmology.

To find out more, you can download a pdf file of the paper here.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

We’re having a great response to the launch of Zoo 2, so we are having to move to a more powerful computer. It’ll only take a couple of minutes, and then everything will work faster!

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

“Wow! Just wow!”

Over the last week I’ve been taking a look at the data that many of you have been generating on the Galaxy Zoo 2 beta site. It’s great to see that the Galaxy Zoo magic is working again, and this time we have so much more information about each galaxy! We really are going to be able to do some amazing research with the Galaxy Zoo 2 data.

However, the current task is quality control, in particular making sure that the answers we are getting correspond to what we had in mind when we came up with the Galaxy Zoo 2 questions. We want to be sure that we aren’t asking questions that can’t be answered given the typical quality of SDSS images, or that aren’t going to give us useful information about the galaxies. We also want to see where we may be able to improve the questions to better discriminate between different types of galaxy, and where we should rewrite the tutorial to give more guidance.

This testing was one of the reasons for having a beta stage. However, even though the data collected so far was for mainly for quality control, we will definitely also be using it for science. In particular, it will give us a preliminary idea of the results we can expect to find in the full Galaxy Zoo 2 dataset, which we can advertise at conferences this spring. Thanks to all our beta testers for helping us to ensure that Galaxy Zoo 2 will be a success.

To show you how well the current Galaxy Zoo 2 system is working, here is a prettified version of the page I made which got me saying “Wow!”, Chris jumping around his office, and made the whole team very happy when it was sent around on Friday. (Sorry if the images load slowly - there are a quite a lot of them!)

I’m now adding more quantitative information for the team, such as graphs of the distribution of answers for each question, to test all the things I described above so that we can improve the tutorial and classification system ready for the imminent full launch of Galaxy Zoo 2 to the world.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites