GZoo2 Bar paper accepted in MNRAS

Dear all,

After a lot of hard work by all involved, we are very pleased to say that the Galaxy Zoo2 Bar-Drawing paper has finally been accepted in Monthly Notices of the Royal Society. It will appear on the arXiv tomorrow, and there are links to access the data in the paper, and on my website here and the zooniverse repository.

The paper uses the results of an off-shoot Zooniverse project. This project present users with SDSS GalaxyZoo2 galaxies using the Google Maps interface, and asked the users to preform certain tasks.
Many of the galaxies had been classified by GZoo2 as containing a bar (an elongated structure extending across the center of the galaxy) and the users were asked to measure the bar length and thickness, and determine how the bar and spiral arms were connected, see the image below.

We had over 200 users on this off-shoot project, and ~14,000 unique bar classifications were made! Without your help, this project would have never have taken place. In fact, at the time we started writing the paper, this work contained almost 100 *times* more galaxies than any previous bar-galaxy research paper! Our statistics were overwhelming.

We found many interesting features, some were already known, but were placed on a far more rigorous footing, and others were new. For example, longer bars inhabit redder disk galaxies and
the bars themselves are redder, and that the bluest galaxies host the smallest galactic
bars; and we found that galaxies whose bars are directly connected to the spiral arms are preferentially bluer and that these galaxies host typically shorter bars. We also compared our results with previous observational works, and with simulations. E.g. a figure showing the bar length measurement against the galaxy color (as measured by the SDSS) can be seen below.

For those of you desperate for a sneak-peak before tomorrow, you can find our paper here.
here

We thank all of the volunteers again, for making this project such a success.

Best,

Ben [on behalf of the bar team]