Many of you helped out with the Galaxy Zoo spinoff project, Galaxy Zoo: 3D. I am happy to let you know that I am presenting results from this project, today at the 237th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society. You can view the iPoster I made about it at this link.

This spin-off project was aimed at supporting the MaNGA (Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory) survey, which is part of the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys (SDSS). Thanks to your input we have been able to crowdsource maps which show where the spiral arms, bars and any foreground stars are present in every galaxy observed by MaNGA. This, combined with the MaNGA data is helping to reveal how these internal structures impact galaxies.

The results will be part of a Press Conference about this and other SDSS results, live streamed at 4.30pm ET (9.30pm GMT) on the AAS Press Office Youtube Channel. The press release about them will go live on the SDSS Press Page at the same time. Direct link to press release (will only work after 4.30pm ET).

Thanks again for your contributions to understanding how galaxies work.

Just a quick post to say thank you for your contributions to Galaxy Zoo: 3D in the last couple of weeks. I’m delighted to say that the bar drawing task is now completed. We still have a lot of spirals to draw though, so if you are ready for a challenge come join us in drawing these beautiful structures. Remember we collect 15 answers per galaxy, and use clever algorithms to combine them into a really reliable answer – so do your best, but don’t get too worried if your hand slips slightly! 🙂

I’m posting this on behalf of Amelia Frasier-McKelvie, a postdoc at the University of Nottingham, UK.

Hi – I’m Amelia, and I’m a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Nottingham. I work on galaxy evolution using the Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory (MaNGA) survey (and yes, I know it’s a contrived acronym!) MaNGA aims to observe 10,000 galaxies using integral field spectroscopy, which means instead of just obtaining one spectrum of a galaxy, we take several hundred at all different points across a galaxy. From this, we can infer interesting spatial information on galaxy properties. For example, we can see the regions in which star formation is occurring, or compare the ages of the stars in the bulge regions of a galaxy to the outer disk. By breaking down a galaxy into its components (such as bulge, disk, spiral arms, and bar) we can discover more about how the galaxy formed, and how it has led its life so far.

A MaNGA galaxy (image from SDSS imaging) with the area where spectra will be collected marked by the purple hexagon. Note the bar which is almost horizontal in this image.

 I’m really interested in how bars affect their host galaxies. In particular, I’m looking for observational evidence that bars are involved in the quenching of star formation within a galaxy. This phenomenon is known as secular evolution/quenching. The one thing a galaxy needs to form stars is a reservoir of cool hydrogen gas. It’s been postulated that a bar can transfer matter (such as gas) radially inwards through a galaxy’s disk and into its central regions. If this is the case, then maybe it takes this gas required for star formation and funnels it towards the galactic centre, starving the disk, and ceasing star formation. Simultaneously, this gas that is funnelled into the central regions could either induce a final starburst, using up all gas, or feed an active galactic nucleus (AGN), which can heat the gas to a point where it cannot collapse to form stars.

 If we wanted to catch a bar in the act of quenching a galaxy, we could look for tell-tale signs of this funnelling action, namely a difference in the age and chemical composition of the stellar populations in the bar region of a galaxy when compared to the disk.

Another MaNGA galaxy with a strong bar.

 This is where Galaxy Zoo 3D comes in — I need to know where the bars actually lie in their host galaxies! Galaxy Zoo 3D citizen scientists mark out the bar (and spiral arm) regions of the MaNGA galaxy sample, which I can apply to our data cubes and extract spectra belonging to the galactic bar and disk regions. I can then analyse the bar and disk spectra separately and compare their properties. I’m interested in the global properties of a large sample of galaxies, so I need as many bar and disk region classifications as possible!

Masks made by GZ:3D showing the bar and disk (or not bar) regions of the above galaxy.

 If I can find observational evidence that bars are helping to quench galaxies this will confirm the idea that internal secular evolutionary processes are important in galaxy evolution.

This will prove that along with external factors, internal structures such as bars are extremely important in determining a galaxy’s fate!

We hope you enjoyed hearing about how the masks made in Galaxy Zoo: 3D are being used. There’s still plenty of bars and lots and lots of spirals to mark in the project, so please join in if you’d like to help us complete our sample and help Amelia and others (including me!) with their research. 

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.

I’m delighted to announce the launch of “Galaxy Zoo: 3D” today – this is a small project from a subset of the Galaxy Zoo team where we ask you to help us identify in detail the locations of internal structures seen in a sample of about 30,000 galaxies.

What’s special about these galaxies is that they have been selected to potentially be observed (or in some cases have already been observed) by the “MaNGA” project.

MaNGA (which stands for “Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory” – sorry about that!), is a spectroscopic mapping survey that I have been working with for the last several years. This one of the current surveys which form part of the 4th generation of Sloan Digital Sky Surveys.

SDSS retired its camera in 2012 (its in the basement of the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C!), and is now focusing on measuring spectra of things in space. Instead of taking images of galaxies in just a couple of filters, MaNGA takes spectral images – each of up to hundreds of points in the galaxy has a full spectrum measured, which means we can decode the types of stars and gas found in that part of the galaxy. We can also recover the motions of the stars and gas in the galaxy making use of the Doppler shift (the redshift or blue shift we see in light which comes from moving sources).

An illustration of the type of data MaNGA is taking. You get an image of the galaxy at each wavelength slice (e.g. the green one shown), or a spectrum at any point. You can also combine all the light into a single image. The resolution (sharpness) is poorer than using a camera, but you get a lot more information. Illustration credit: CubeVisualisation

MaNGA will ultimately do this for about 10,000 of the total list (this is how many we can manage in 6 years of operations), and since 2015 has already measured these data for a bit more than 3000 galaxies. To help us interpret this vast quantity of data we’re asking you to draw on the galaxies to mark the locations of spiral arms and bars. We also want to double check the galaxy centres are recorded correctly, and that we have found all the foreground stars which might be getting in the way of the galaxy.

Now one thing you know all about as Galaxy Zoo volunteers is the benefit of human eyes on large samples of galaxies. When we first launched Galaxy Zoo we made use of the “Main Galaxy Sample” from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey as the input list of galaxies. This is a sample of 1 million galaxies automatically identified from the SDSS images, and which had their distances (redshifts) measured in SDSS-I/II. However (perhaps ironically) the algorithm which selected this sample wasn’t very good at finding the biggest most nearby galaxies. Specifically it tended to “shred” them into what it thought were multiple galaxies. My favourite demonstration of this is the Pinwheel galaxy (M101), which the first SDSS galaxy detection algorithm interpreted as a cluster of galaxies.

M101 as seen by the original SDSS galaxy finding algorithm – each red box was thought to be a separate galaxy. Image from Brichman et al. 2013.

(Don’t worry – ever resourceful, astronomers have made plenty of use of these galaxies which have multiple spectra measured – it turns out to be really useful).

By the time MaNGA came along this problem was well known, and instead of making use of the standard SDSS galaxy catalogues, MaNGA targeted nearby galaxies by making use of the “NASA Sloan Atlas“- a NASA funded project to make a more  careful list of nearby bright galaxies in the SDSS images.

So what we discovered when putting together the sample for Galaxy Zoo: 3D is that not all MaNGA galaxies have Galaxy Zoo classifications. In fact about 10% are missing, and we also found some more galaxies we missed first time round. It turns out that by relying on automatic galaxy finding there were a quite a few galaxies which had been missed before.

So these are back in the main site right now.

In Galaxy Zoo: 3D we will only ask you to draw spiral arms on galaxies you have previously said have spiral arms, so we’ll be making use of the new classifications to sort out the last 10% of MaNGA galaxies. We’ll also create a complete Galaxy Zoo classification list for the MaNGA sample, which will be really useful for people working with that sample.

To tempt you to give it a go, here are some interesting and beautiful MaNGA galaxies being discussed in Talk by our beta testers (the purple hexagon indicates the part of the galaxy where MaNGA can measure spectra). More than half of all the galaxies in MaNGA them are nearby galaxies with lots of structure. I think you’re really going to enjoy exploring them, and at the same time really help us learn a lot about galaxies.