Eight Years and the 8 Most Talked-About Galaxies in Galaxy Zoo
Continuing the countdown to Galaxy Zoo’s 8th birthday, below are 8 of the most-commented-on galaxies in the active Galaxy Zoo. They range near (in astronomical terms) and far, from gorgeous disks to space-warping groups, and some of them aren’t even galaxies at all!
8. Galaxies Interacting (Arp 112)
#merger #arc #g-pair #bulge #tidaltails #ugc #wow #agn #ngc #ngc7806 #arp #markarian #dustlane #available_in_dr7 #spiral #gpair #awesome #tidal #lens #no_lens
A lovely example of the diversity of structures in the Universe. The central galaxy may have been a perfectly symmetric spiral before it was seriously disturbed by the elliptical galaxy on the left side of the shot, and what’s that wispy thing off to the right? Is it a former part of the central galaxy? And what is this all going to look like in a few billion years? Whatever happens, the volunteers made it clear this is a special one to classify and to look at.
#lens #lensing #knownlens #arc #lense #interesting
This gorgeous gravitational lens was spotted almost immediately upon the launch of the new Galaxy Zoo within the high-redshift CANDELS data. It generated multiple lively discussions and scientists and volunteers alike weighed in with further information. It turned out in this case that this was one of very few lenses that were already known, but there are likely still unknown lenses buried in the data, waiting to be discovered!
#quasar #edge #lbg #star
Initially identified as a high-redshift star-forming galaxy by one of our seasoned volunteers, a number of people subsequently looked further into the existing scientific literature. There was a lot of debate about this particular point of light, but in the end the volunteers uncovered a later paper confirming that this green gem (which would actually be either very red or nearly invisible to the human eye, as it’s “green” because it only shows up in the infrared filters used for this image) is actually just a star in our galaxy. Bummer, maybe, but this process is also an important part of science.
#dustlane #polar #polarring #beautiful #polar-ring #elliptical #ring #edgeon #mothership #dust #polaring #question
This spectacular example of a polar ring galaxy couldn’t have been found in the original Galaxy Zoo or Galaxy Zoo 2, because it only made it into the Sloan Digital Sky Survey when the sky coverage was extended.
#merger #arp148 #arp #available_in_dr7 #lookalike #alphabet #ring
It takes a special kind of galaxy crash to make a collisional ring, and you can see this one in progress. It reminded our volunteers and scientists of the Cartwheel galaxy, another spectacular example of these snapshots of a brief moment in time.
#merger #odd #dark #needle #holycow #wow #doublenucleus #tidaldebris #disturbed #rocket #cluster #irregularshape #spaceship #rocketship
Well, this is odd. This galaxy looks like it’s on its own, but it has a rather unusual shape that would usually imply some sort of interaction or collision. Our volunteers discussed what could be causing it – until they viewed a zoomed-out image and it became clear that this galaxy has recently flown by a trio of galaxies, which would be more than enough to disrupt it into this lovely shape.
2. Hubble Resolves the Distant Universe
#spiral #overlap #dustlane #starburst #edge-on #edgeon
When a new batch of data taken by the Hubble Space Telescope appeared on the latest Galaxy Zoo, this was one of the first stunners remarked on by several people. Some of the parts of the sky covered by Hubble coincide with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and we linked the surveys up via Talk. Our tireless volunteers launched a thread collecting side-by-side images from SDSS and Hubble, showcasing the power of the world’s greatest space telescope. Hubble’s primary mirror is about the same size as that used by the SDSS, so the differences between the images of the same galaxy are due to the blurring effect of the atmosphere.
SDSS (on Earth) at left, HST (in space) at right.
And, the most talked about image in the latest Galaxy Zoo is…
It’s always the galaxies you least expect.
Okay, okay… If you saw this and said it looks like there isn’t a lot to talk about here, I wouldn’t blame you. And, indeed, there’s only one “short” comment from one of our volunteers, who used our Examine tools and discovered that this little blotch appears to be a very high-redshift galaxy.
However, that same volunteer also started a discussion with the question: just for fun, what’s the highest redshift you’ve found? Others responded, and thus began a quest to find the galaxy in Galaxy Zoo that is the farthest distance from us. This discussion is Galaxy Zoo at its finest, with new and experienced volunteers using the project as inspiration for their own investigations, scouring the scientific literature, and learning about the very early Universe.
It seems like the most likely known candidate so far is a quasar at a redshift of about 5.5 (at which point the Universe was about 1 billion years old), or, if you don’t think a quasar counts, an extended galaxy at z = 4 or so (1.5 billion years old). But there’s just so much science wonderfulness here, all of it from our fantastic volunteers, and it all started with a patchy blob and a sense of curiosity.
Galaxy Zoo started with a million blobs (ish) and a sense of adventure. I think that’s fitting.
Galaxy Zoo 
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