Galaxy Zoo paper on host galaxies of growing black holes submitted!

It’s usually me who is reminding people to go blog about paper submissions and acceptances, so it’s a bit embarassing that I forgot to remind myself last week to announce the submission of the latest Galaxy Zoo paper.

I’ve been working on it for a while, probably over a year. The paper took so long to finish because not only did we have to analyse a huge amount of data, it also took quite a while to figure out what it all meant. I kept producing new plots that showed trends that didn’t really make any sense to us. We therefore needed to take our time digesting what we saw and condensing it into a `readable’ paper. It still over 20 pages long and there are still many results for which we could only offer some speculation. It’s not an easy paper to summarise, so I will (for now) simply summarise it as: “the black hole growth in spiral and elliptical galaxies is due to completely different evolutionary scenarios.”

Or, as I will put it in my talk on Friday at the IAU Symposium on the black hole-galaxy connection:

The answer may depend on

(thanks to stellar on the forum!)

Unlike our previous papers, this is the first paper that we have decided to submit to the Astrophysical Journal. Now fingers crossed that the refereeing process goes well.