Speaking of mergers…

Just as we have all been examining and testing for merging galaxies within Galaxy Zoo, the folks at Hubble have released a catalog of beautiful pictures of 59 pairs of merging galaxies. Take a look at the images – some of them are really beautiful, and they make an interesting contrast with the SDSS images that Galaxy Zoo uses. The SDSS is a survey, so see everything we can see, and the Hubble Space Telescope is a queue-based observing telescope, meaning it gets images one-by-one of interesting objects.

Frank Summers, the visualization genius at the Space Telescope Science Institute, has produced some great animations to go with the merging galaxies catalog release. The animations really help you get a sense for how scientists go about using computer simulations to study merging galaxies. It’s a tricky business, because there isn’t a one-to-one relationship between where two merging galaxies start from and where they end up – mergers that look the same can result from vastly different circumstances. The best way to study mergers is to look at a lot of them to find similarities and differences – which is exactly what you’re doing with Galaxy Zoo!