Galaxy Zoo: Literature Search – Initial Results

Thanks to everyone who has helped with the Galaxy Zoo Literature Search so far. It’s not too late to join in (for full details see the first blog post), but I thought I would write a followup summarising some of the findings so far. Hopefully it’ll help clarify what we’re looking for, and you won’t have to worry about repeating any of the papers we already have.

Academic life is full of lots of different tasks which occupy our time more or less at different parts of the year. It’s one of those things which I enjoy about it so much, but is is also basically my excuse for why work on the paper has ground to a halt in the last month. I have been occupied with teaching undergraduate Computational Physics, SDSS Spokesperson duties, and keeping on top of lots of remote observing with the Green Bank Radio Telescope. All good fun, but not paper writing! However this paper is making it back up to the top of my to do list now (hence this blog post!), so I hope to have more news for you on it soon.

Anyway here’s my summary of the new papers you have found for us in the different categories. We had no submissions yet of new papers defining early-types as E/S0/Sa, or late-types as being only types Sb/Sc/Sd yet, so keep looking for those.

Also as a reminder that when we’re talking about galaxies red = shorthand for not forming stars (or quenched), so sometimes astronomers use red and quenched (or passive) interchangeably. And spectra can also be used to find galaxies which are not forming stars, so spectral type and colour are highly related.

We also have a ton of different ways to talk about galaxy bulge size, from B/T (bulge-total ratio), to various model fits to light profiles (e.g. the Sersic profile, where Sersic n>2.5 is generally take to mean there’s a bulge, and n=1 means a pure disc). Concentration is also talked about – a more concentrated galaxy is more likely to have a bulge, than a less concentrated galaxy. And in SDSS there is a “fracDeV” parameter, which is the fraction of the model light curve made up from a “De Vaucouleur profile”, which is the same as a Sersic profile with n=4. We don’t like to make life too easy for newcomers in astronomy! 😉

The list of papers that:

1. Claim that colour and morphology are equivalent

Strateva et al. 2001: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/#abs/2001AJ….122.1861S/abstract
A classic here, and possibly the root of this idea: “We use visual morphology and spectral classification of subsamples of 287 and 500 galaxies, respectively, to show that the two peaks correspond roughly to early- (E, S0, and Sa) and late-type (Sb, Sc, and Irr) galaxies, as expected from their different stellar populations.”
Note that they are defining early- and late-types in the way I would like to find more examples of.

Fang et al. 2013: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/#abs/2013ApJ…776…63F/abstract
This one is a bit complicated. They state in the Introduction that “galaxies above a Sersic value of n ≈ 2.5 tend to be quiescent. “ and go on to claim that having a large bulge is necessary but not sufficient to be quenched (ie. red). Which means they acknowledge the existence of blue ellipticals (or blue galaxies with large bulges), but not red spirals with small bulges.

In their conclusions they state: “our results imply that galaxy quenching requires the presence of a bulge, but that a bulge alone is not enough to ensure the complete cessation of SF. “

This was not exactly what we were looking for, but definitely related, and interesting.
Huerta-Company et al. 2011 http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2011A%26A…525A.157H

Good try, but I’m not sure this quite counts in this category – they use colour as part of their classification scheme (which we would definitely not recommend), but it’s not the only part, so they’re not really saying it’s the same as morphology. “Three types of parameters used to estimate morphology probabilities; “we decided to include three types of parameters: (1) color (g − r, r − i) k-corrected with Blanton et al. (2005) code; (2) shape (isoB/isoA in the i-band and deVAB_i); and (3) light concentration (R90/R50 in the i-band). For color measurements we use modelmagnitudes corrected for galactic extinction. isoB and isoA are the isophotal minor and major axes respectively, and deVAB_i is the DeVaucouleurs fit b/a. R90 and R50 are the radii containing 90% and 50% of the petrosian flux, respectively”

Cooper et al. 2010: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/#abs/2010MNRAS.402.1942C/abstract
In the introduction they say: “Various observational studies have investigated the formation of early-type or red-sequence galaxies “
They then go on to use colour to define their sample: sec. 2 p. 1943:”To isolate the red- sequence population, we use the following magnitude-dependent cut: g − r = −0.02667 · M r + 0.113”
Good find. This definitely just assumes that colour=morphology.

Tal & van Dokkum 2011: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2011ApJ…731…89T
In the words of our volunteer (Jean Tate):
“Throughout this paper, the authors conflate “massive red” with “elliptical”. This formally begins with the selection criteria (“We selected galaxy images for this study from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS, Abazajian et al. 2009) including all objects classified as Luminous Red Galaxies (LRG) that have a spectroscopic redshift measurement. LRGs are intrinsically red and luminous objects that were identified as such from their central surface brightness and location on a rotated color-color diagram (for full details see Eisenstein et al. 2001). This selection is aimed at finding the most luminous red galaxies in the nearby Universe (L 3L⋆) out to a redshift of z = 0.5.”)”) which does not distinguish between red ellipticals and red spirals (nor red S0s). However, the first sentence in the Discussion section strongly implies that massive red S0s and massive red spirals are irrelevant (“The first and foremost result that arises from this study is that faint, gravitationally bound stellar light can be traced in massive elliptical galaxies out to a radius of 100 kpc.”), to take just one example.”

Another good find, and very common that LRG=elliptical is assumed.

2. Define “early-type” galaxy as any galaxy without visible spiral arms (e.g. our “smooth” category, which can include elliptical galaxies, and smooth disks), rather than as a galaxy that isn’t a disk.

So here I basically meant they were defining early-type as E and S0 only, and we got one submission like that:

Stanford et al. 1998: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1998ApJ…492..461S. “We present results from an optical-infrared photometric study of early-type (E+S0) galaxies in 19 galaxy clusters out to z = 0.9.”
“In this paper, we use the term ““early-type” galaxy to refer to those galaxies classified morphologically as having Hubble classes E, E/S0, or S0. “

3. Define “early-type” galaxy as including Sa spirals as well as lenticular and ellipticals.

No submissions yet – although note that Strateva et al. 2001 (above) do this.

4. Define “late-type” galaxy as only late-type spirals (e.g. excluding Sa spirals)

No submissions yet – although note that Strateva et al. 2001 (above) do this.

5. Use colour or spectral type to split galaxies into “early-“ or “late-“ types (or “elliptical” and “spiral”)

van den Bergh 2007: http://cdsads.u-strasbg.fr/cgi-bin/nph-bib_query?2007AJ….134.1508V&db_key=AST&nosetcookie=1 actually has a contrary view, claiming that “there appears to be no obvious dichotomy between the morphologies of galaxies that are situated on the broad blue and on the narrow red sequences in the galaxian color-magnitude diagram.”

Bell et al. 2004: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2004ApJ…608..752B
Exactly what we were looking for. They use colour to split their sample into “late” and “early” types, saying:
“”We find that the rest-frame color distribution of these galaxies is bimodal at all redshifts out to z ~ 1. This bimodality permits a model-independent definition of red early-type galaxies and blue late-type galaxies at any given redshift. ”

Cooper et al. 2010: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/#abs/2010MNRAS.402.1942C/abstract
Another good example of using colour to define an early-type sample:
sec. 2 p. 1943:”To isolate the red- sequence population, we use the following magnitude-dependent cut:
g − r = −0.02667 · M r + 0.113”
In doing this they are assuming that red = early-type. In the introduction they say: “Various observational studies have investigated the formation of early-type or red-sequence galaxies “

Almedia et al. 2011: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2011ApJ…735..125S
Actually seem to be looking into how well the correlation between spectral type and morphology works, saying: “Given a spectral class, the morphological type wavers with a standard deviation between 2 and 3 T types, and the same large dispersion characterizes the variability of spectral classes given a morphological type.”

So this is actually evidence that morphology and spectral type are not completely equivalent.

Ascasibar & Almeida 2011: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2011MNRAS.415.2417A
But now in this one, the claim is that the correlation is good enough to use spectral classifications to place galaxies into a morphological sequence: “Considering galaxy spectra as multidimensional vectors, the majority of the spectral classes are distributed along a well-defined curve going from the earliest to the latest types, suggesting that the optical spectra of normal galaxies can be described in terms of a single affine parameter.”

6. Use the bulge-to-total ratio (or some proxy for it like concentration, or the SDSS “fracDeV” parameter) to place spiral galaxies in a sequence.

Goto et al. 2003: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2003MNRAS.346..601G
p. 604 : “Based on the Tauto parameter, we divide galaxies into four subsamples…”
Looking into this, “Tauto” is an attempt to parameters both the bulge size, and the amount of structure not captured in a smooth light profile (some form of clumpiness), so it does indeed neglect the degree of windiness of the spiral arm in placing them in a sequence by bulge size and clumsiness only. Nice find.

Drory & Fisher 2007: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007ApJ…664..640D
This paper actually provides evidence that B/T is not enough to classify galaxies into a sequence, pointing out that there are different types of bulge (pseudobulges, which are thought to be build up slowly from discs, and classical bulges, general thought to form in mergers) which correlate with galaxy colour even at the same B/T.

“(1) the red-blue dichotomy is a function of bulge type: at the same B/T, pseudobulges are in globally blue galaxies and classical bulges are in globally red galaxies; “

In summary, I hope this was interesting, and there’s definitely some examples you hve found which will make it into the reference list for the paper.  Thanks again for your help, and if you are now inspired to join in go read the instructions here. We’d love to have you along.