Galaxy Zoo at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science

The Galaxy Zoo science team is well represented this week at the annual European Week of Astronomy and Space Science, hosted this year at the Pope’s University (or more properly Pontifica Universita Laternase) in Rome, Italy.

It is a beautiful location for a conference

with the most amazingly decorated lecture theatre I’ve ever been in

and just up the road from the Colluseum

A session on the first day on the Structure of Galactic Discs perhaps explains the interest of many of us on the Galaxy Zoo team. I spoke in that session on my recent results looking at bars and the atomic gas content of nearby galaxies.

Brooke Simmons (now settling in as a new postdoc at Oxford after finishing her PhD at Yale recently) had a poster on some work I’m sure you’ll hear about soon about some very interesting totally bulge free disc galaxies which still have actively growing supermassive black holes in their centres.

And Portsmouth PhD student, Tom Melvin (who is working with me) had a poster on his work using Galaxy Zoo: Hubble data to look at the redshift evolution of the bar fraction (more on that very soon too I hope).

Finally, talking in the session on interacting galaxies which runs tomorrow will be Kevin Casteels from Barcelona (who we all must congratulate on his very recent PhD) who has been working mostly with Steven Bamford on morphological signatures of closely interacting pairs of galaxies (arxiv link to paper, a blog post has been promised).

We all had a lovely (and typically late Italian) dinner together on Monday night – along with a Galaxy Zoo baby: Alia (Kevin’s daughter).