Post starburst galaxies at the AAS.

At our AAS session, Ivy Wong (formerly of Yale, now back in her native Australia) talked about her work on post starburst galaxies. Post starburst galaxies are extremely rare, and in her paper (which is in the referee process at Monthly Notices), Ivy compares a sample of about 80 local post starburst galaxies to the parent sample they were drawn from which is made up of almost 50,000 of the galaxies you classifed in Galaxy Zoo 1.

The conclusion – post starburst galaxies are dominated by objects who have intermediate morphology (often half of you thought they were disks and half thought they were ellipticals – telling us that they are just hard to classify!). They are found in the low mass part of the “green valley” (ie. they are redder than most blue spirals, but bluer than most red ellipticals) and Ivy suggests this shows they are probably on the way to turning into the low mass end of the red sequence.

Ivy has provided the slides of her talk: Wong_AAS218talk.pdf.