First Radio Galaxy Zoo paper has been submitted!

The project description and early science paper (results from Year 1) for the Radio Galaxy Zoo project has been submitted!

We find that the RGZ citizen scientists are as effective as the science experts at identifying the radio sources and their host galaxies.

Based upon our results from 1 year of operation, we find the RGZ host galaxies reside in 3 primary loci of mid-infrared colour space.  The mid-infrared colour space is defined by the WISE filter bands: W1, W2 and W3, corresponding to 3.4, 4.6 and 12 microns; respectively.

Approximately 10% of the RGZ sample reside in the mid-IR colour space dominated by elliptical galaxies, which have older stellar populations and are less dusty, hence resulting in bluer (W2-W3) colours. The 2nd locus (where ~15% of RGZ sources are found) lies in the colour space known as the `AGN wedge’, typically associated with X-ray-bright QSOs and Seyferts. And lastly, the largest concentration of RGZ host galaxies (~30%) can be found in the 3rd locus usually associated with luminous infrared galaxies (LIRGs).  It should be noted that only a small fraction of LIRGs are associated with late-stage mergers.  The remainder of the RGZ host population are distributed along the loci of both star-forming and active galaxies, indicative of radio emission from star-forming galaxies and/or dusty elliptical (non-star-forming) galaxies. See the figure below for a plot of these results.

Caption to figure:  WISE colour-colour diagram, showing sources from the WISE all-sky catalog (colourmap), 33,127 sources from the 75% RGZ catalog (black contours), and powerful radio galaxies (green points) from (Gürkan et al. 2014). The wedge used to identify IR colours of X-ray-bright AGN from Lacy et al. (2004) & Mateos et al. (2012) is overplotted (red dashes). Only 10% of the WISE all-sky sources have colours in the X-ray bright AGN wedge; this is contrasted with 40% of RGZ and 49% of the Gürkan et al. (2014) radio galaxies. The remaining RGZ sources have WISE colours consistent with distinct populations of elliptical galaxies and LIRGs, with smaller numbers of spiral galaxies and starbursts.

In addition, we will also be submitting our paper on Hybrid Morphology Radio Sources (HyMoRS) in the next few days so stay tuned!

As always, thank you all very much for all your help and support and keep up the awesome work!

Cheers,
Julie, Ivy & the RGZ science team