Green Valley: The Town Too Good To Die
I swear we are consistently trying to keep our live hangouts to about 15 minutes. We have so far failed at keeping to time, but hopefully also succeeded in the sense that we only run over because there’s so much to discuss.
We had a number of good questions from Twitter, Facebook and the blog about various types of galaxies — from red spirals to green peas and blue ellipticals — and I rather arbitrarily decided this was an indication that our hangout should have a color theme. That is, what exactly does “color” mean in the context of astronomy? What is going on physically when a galaxy is one color versus another, or has multiple colors? Is color information always telling us the same thing? We tried to address all those questions, as well as show some examples of different galaxies in the above queried categories. As a bonus, we learned how galaxy colors are related to the town my grandparents retired to. (This post’s title is a quote from the Green Valley Chamber of Commerce’s official website.) That was as much a surprise to me as it was to the viewers!
We also talked about what’s currently going on in Galaxy Zoo behind the scenes. Earlier today, Kyle sent around a really nice draft of the Galaxy Zoo 2 data paper for the team to read and comment on (you’ll have to watch the video to get a sneak peek at some of the figures).
And it’s that time again: Hubble Space Telescope proposals are due in about a week. We talked about the proposal process from concept to submission to review, discussing both specifics of certain telescopes and the general practices that (we hope) help lead to a successful proposal. Here’s a hint: it may not be what you think!
We covered all this and some other questions, too. No wonder we ran a little over…
And here’s the podcast version:
Is it a triple merger? A double overlap? A hybrid?
A blue(ish) and red spiral.
A red and blue elliptical.
A tiny green pea galaxy, and zoomed-in at right.
Next Galaxy Zoo Hangout: 22 Feb, 15:30 GMT
Next Galaxy Zoo Hangout: Friday, the 22nd of February, 2013, 3:30 p.m. GMT
We got a lot of good questions for the last live chat — keep ’em coming! Post your questions below and/or feel free to tweet them @galaxyzoo.
Shortly before the hangout starts, we’ll embed the video in this post so you can watch from here. And during the chat, if we use a science term you aren’t familiar with, please use the Jargon Gong by tweeting us with a GONG (example: “@galaxyzoo GONG spiral density wave”); we’ll be happy to stop and explain!
Update: The summary of the hangout, and the video, are now here.
Live Chat: Galactic Rings, Secular Evolution and The Good Old Days
It’s amazing what happens when you actually publicize your live chat in advance. We got so many questions, we decided to spend the entire chat just discussing them, and we still didn’t finish!
Partly that’s because we had a surprise guest appearance from the esteemed Ron Buta, who came in just after we had talked about some of the details covered in his Galaxy Morphology article (his Figure 3 is shown in the image). Ron worked with Gérard de Vaucouleurs — aka GdV — and told us some amusing stories about trying to take photometric* observations of dwarf galaxies, and about how GdV’s wife used to disagree with his morphologies, at one point looking over his shoulder and proclaiming, “no, there’s no ring”. I rather liked that story as it’s a reminder that anyone can spot patterns in galaxy images.
We’ll try to answer those questions on the previous blog post that we didn’t get to there — but in the meantime, here’s the video:
Left to right: Ron Buta & Bill Keel, Karen Masters, Kevin Schawinski, Brooke Simmons (me). Toward the end (not shown on the thumbnail), Kyle Willett arrived just in time to answer a question about the status of the latest Galaxy Zoo classification set.
We made ample use of the jargon gong on ourselves, but we may not have managed to define all the terms Ron used. We’ll try to do so in this post — if we’ve missed any please say so in the comments!
*photometry = precise quantitative measurements of the brightness of objects in the sky. You need very good observing conditions to take photometric measurements, which many (but not all) astronomical projects require.
Update: Now in podcast form:
Ask us your questions for the next Live Chat!
Next Galaxy Zoo Live Chat: Friday, the 8th of February, 2013, 3:00 p.m. GMT
Topic: TBA! (Translation: we’re just going to wing it.)
We’ve already had some good questions submitted for our live chat, ranging from detailed inquiries about galaxy evolution to the orbital mechanics of moons. If you have a question for us, post it below and we’ll try to answer it! (You can also tweet questions @galaxyzoo at any time.)
Update: see questions answered in the Live Chat video here!
