My name is Ciaran O’Hare, I’m a sixth form student at The Cherwell School in Oxford and I came to the Oxford University Astrophysics department as part of my work experience for Year 12. I was set a task to complete of the course of the week, to sort through hundreds of e-mails from from the users of Galaxy Zoo about the unusual ring galaxies.

So I catalogued these galaxies and created catagories, and by finding some data about them we were able to make some interesting discoveries.The ring galaxy is a specific type of galaxy that is believed to be the remnant of a head on collision between a large spiral galaxy and smaller galaxy. One of the most famous is the Cartwheel Galaxy. The first and most common catagory that I made is the circular ring galaxy. These have circular rings and nuclei. Around 54% of the galaxies were of this type.

Typical example -

The second catagory is the elliptical ring galaxies, these have elliptical nuclei and most often, elliptical rings aswell. About 24% of the galaxies were of this type.

Typical example -

The third catagory is the multiple ringed galaxy, where the central nucleus is surrounded by several concentric rings. About 14% of the galaxies were of this type.

Typical example -

The final type is the off centred nucleus. Similar to the first two catagories but the nucleus is not at the centre of the galaxy. This was the rarest catagory it was made up of only 6% of all the galaxies.

Typical example -

An interesting galaxy that a number of users sent in was this, which was the most bizarre one I came across.

I also looked at the spectra of all the galaxies and found that the large majority of them generally fell with the redder galaxies, with only 1 in 8 having bluer spectra. Also, by measuring the radius of the ring we were able to find an age of the galaxy by taking the expansion rate from the cartwheel galaxy. And by comparing this age with the spectra it is clear that the bluer the galaxy is, the younger it is.

These results will now be followed up with more research, and I’d like to thank everyone who e-mailed Galaxy Zoo, for helping in finding these elusive galaxies.

C. O’Hare.

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Just a reminder (in the absence of the forum) that there’s a Galaxy Zoo meet-up in London this Tuesday. It’ll follow a lecture I’m giving as part of the Royal Astronomical Society’s Lunchtime Lecture Series at their apartments in Burlington House, Picadilly (look for the Royal Academy of Arts). The lecture begins at 1, although you might want to turn up a bit earlier to make sure you get a seat, and we’ll gather in the courtyard outside the RAS at 2 and then go and find somewhere for a late lunch. Hope to see you all tomorrow. Chris

10 JUNE: RAS LUNCHTIME LECTURE: HUBBLE, BUBBLE, TOIL AND TROUBLE: A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE MOST FAMOUS TELESCOPE EVER MADE: BURLINGTON HOUSE, LONDON

Dr Chris Lintott, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford, STFC Science and Society Fellow and co-presenter of the BBC ‘Sky at Night’ will tell the story of the NASA / ESA Hubble Space Telescope (HST), in orbit since 1990. This autumn, astronauts aboard the space shuttle Atlantis will carry out one of the most difficult repairs in history, with the aim of restoring the HST to full working order. Dr Lintott’s lecture will tell the HST story, and look forward to the discoveries still to be made.

The lunchtime lectures are open to everyone and take place in the newly-refurbished Burlington House, the headquarters of the RAS off Piccadilly in central London. The lectures take place at 1pm on the first Tuesday of each month from September to June and the audience can take their seats from 12.45.

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Chris and I are at the AAS meeting in St. Louis. Chris has been keeping up with the meeting on his blog, and we’ve both given talks about Galaxy Zoo. Everyone here is really excited about what we’ve been able to do with Galaxy Zoo - great job, everyone!

Last night, Chris and I held a Galaxy Zoo planning meeting while watching a St. Louis Cardinals baseball game. Here is a beautiful photo of where we were - Busch Stadium in St. Louis (click for a larger version):

Photo from Flicker user pdsphil

Here is a beautiful photo of Busch Stadium 3.2 times over:

Why is that significant?

We suddenly realized, looking up at the stadium, that this is how large Galaxy Zoo is.

The stadium holds about 45,000 people. At last count, Galaxy Zoo had 141,960 volunteers. Here are some other things that we are bigger than:

• The entire nation of St. Vincent and the Grenadines
• Chris’s hometown, twice over
• The entire student population of the Universities of Michigan, Illinois, and Texas, combined
• The Italian Army
• …and 30 American Astronomical Societies.

More suggestions?

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If you’re a regular user of the forum at http://www.galaxyzooforum.org/ you’ll notice that it’s currently offline. There’s been a sizeable server outage which has affected it (along with many other websites), and we hope it will be back up soon - but this outage is out of our control. We were actually already planning to transfer it to a new server anyway, and we were hoping to do this on Tuesday, although this downtime may unfortunately get in the way of our plans.  If the forum does come back up in time, we may take it down for Tuesday in order to make this transfer, but it should be back up shortly after that. Please bear with us until we can get everything back up and running properly! 

Update: Forum is still down unfortunately, but the support staff at the hosting site are working hard to bring it back up. It looks like the transfer will be delayed - and hopefully we’ll be able to give some warning of any resulting downtime from that. 

Update 2: (Wednesday morning) Unfortunately there’s been hardware issues as the support technicians tried to bring the server back up. They’re still working on bringing it back up - no estimate for when this will take place I’m afraid.  

Update 3: (Thursday morning) We’re in the process of trying to reinstall the forum framework and content back on the original server. A temporary forum is in place. It is not organised in the same way and has a different theme to emphasise this fact, and no posts there will be retained (except maybe in rare cases).

Update 4: (Wednesday morning - 11th June) The disk holding the forum is with a data recovery team, but unfortunately they won’t be able to get anything off for approximately another week at the earliest.

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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.

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