GZ Quench: Classification Complete – Now the Real Fun Begins!

Congratulations all! We’ve completed Phase 1 of Galaxy Zoo Quench! Over 1600 people lent us their time and pattern-recognition skills to complete the needed 120,000 classifications. Thank you!

Now is when GZ Quench gets really fun, interesting, and totally different from past projects. We’re not stopping with classifications; we’re helping our volunteers to go all the way… from soup to nuts, as some like to say.

Phase 2 begins today and will run for the next few weeks*, with our science team supporting you, our esteemed Zooniverse volunteers, in the data analysis and discussion.

We’ll be using the results from our classifications of the 3002 post-quenched galaxies + 3002 control galaxies to address the following questions: What causes the star formation in these galaxies to be quenched? What role do galaxy mergers play in galaxy evolution? Join us in exploring these questions, being a part of the scientific process, and contributing to our understanding of this dynamic phase of galaxy evolution!

Luckily, we have great tools to help make this phase accessible to anyone, no matter your background.

• Quenchtalk.galaxyzoo.org – our discussion forum within which there are already really interesting and exciting conversations happening between Zooites and the science team. This forum allows us to share knowledge, pursue interesting results, collaboratively make sense of interesting plots, and determine which results to include in our article.
• Tools.zooniverse.org – our online data visualization environment, which helps you play with the data and look for trends. Click here for the blog post and to watch the GZ google hangout describing Tools and the Quench Tools tutorial.
• Authorea.com – the online article writing platform we’ll be using to collaboratively write the GZ Quench article, to be submitted to a professional journal. This is the same online environment that a group of over 100 CERN physicists are using to write their articles.

We can’t stress enough that you do not need prior background or knowledge to take part in this next phase. Each of you brings useful skills to the project – asking questions, communication, critical thinking, organization, leadership, consensus building, intuition, etc. Through Quench Talk, we’ll help you apply those skills in this context, and enable you to get your feet wet experiencing the full process of science.

Have questions about the project? Ask us on Twitter (@galaxyzoo), Facebook, or within Quench Talk.

*Science timelines often subject to a factor of two uncertainty. We’ll do our best to keep on track, at the same time expecting the unexpected (all part of the fun of doing science!).