Galaxy Zoo Highlights from 2015
Following on from the excellent summary of the hi-lights in 2015 for the Radio Galaxy Zoo project, here’s a similar post about results from Galaxy Zoo.
This year we collected 4,755,448 classifications on 209,291 different images of galaxies. You continue to amaze us with your collective efforts. Thank you so much for each and everyone of of these classifications.
The year started with Galaxy Zoo scientists at Mauna Kea observing galaxies, and reported in this wonderful series of blog posts by (former) Zooniverse developer Ed Paget.
We celebrated 8 years of Galaxy Zoo back in July, with this blog series of all things 8-like about Galaxy Zoo.
Back in May we finished collecting classifications on the last of our Hubble Space Telescope images. At the AAS in Florida this week, Kyle Willett and Brooke Simmons presented posters on the planned data releases for the classifications.
We both launched and finished classifying the first set of images of simulated galaxies from the Illustris Simulation (read more here: New Images for Galaxy Zoo: Illustris and here: Finished with First Set of Illustris Images). We also launched our first set of images from the DECaLS survey, which is using the Dark Energy Camera (New Images for Galaxy Zoo: DECaLS)
We also launched a new Galaxy Zoo side project – Galaxy Zoo Bars (one of the first projects built on the new Zooniverse Project Builder software), measuring bar lengths of galaxies in the distant Universe. The entire set were measured in less than a year, so thank you to any of you who contributed to that, and if you missed it don’t worry, we have plans for more special projects this year.
We launched a new web interface to explore the Galaxy Zoo classifications.
Our contributions to the peer reviewed astronomical literature continue. Papers number 45-48 from the team were officially published in 2015. They were:
– Galaxy Zoo: the effect of bar-driven fueling on the presence of an active galactic nucleus in disc galaxies, Galloway+ 2015.
– Galaxy Zoo: Evidence for Diverse Star Formation Histories through the Green Valley, Smethurst+ 2015.
– Galaxy Zoo: the dependence of the star formation-stellar mass relation on spiral disc morphology, Willett+ 2015.
You can access all 48 team papers using your classifications at the Zooniverse Publication Page. Remember that all Zooniverse papers published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society – which includes most of the Galaxy Zoo papers – are available open access to any reader, and if we happen to publish elsewhere we always make the post-acceptance version available on the arxiv.org.
All of our papers include a version of this acknowledgement to our classifiers: “The data in this paper are the result of the efforts of the Galaxy Zoo volunteers, without whom none of this work would be possible. Their efforts are individually acknowledged at authors.galaxyzoo.org.” We all hope you all know how grateful we are for each and every one of your classifications.
This year saw publication of the first paper on Hubble observations of Voorwerpje systems accompanied by an HST press release.
One of those papers from (mostly) outside the GZ team discussed a rare examples of double radio sources from spiral hosts, something Radio Galaxy Zoo will find many more of: “J1649+2635: a grand-design spiral with a large double-lobed radio source”, Mao et al. 2015.
Another exciting thing about this year has been the number of papers from non team members using the classifications which are now public (see data.galaxyzoo.org). To date almost 300 astronomical papers have been written which cite the original description of Galaxy Zoo (Lintott et al. 2008) and the two data release papers so far (Lintott et al. 2011 for GZ1 and Willett et al. 2013 for GZ2) have 164 and 34 citations respectively. The number of papers in the Astrophysics Data System which contain the words “Galaxy Zoo” (which you can search in ADS Labs) is an astonishing 700 (409 for refereed publications).
These are just some of the high-lights I’ve pulled together. If I’ve missed your favourite feel free to add it in the comments below. All in all it’s been a great year. Here’s to an equally good 2016!
Summer Research With Galaxy Zoo
The below blog post was written by Alex Todd, an Ogden Summer Intern who spent the summer working on Galaxy Zoo related research projects at the University of Portsmouth. Alex is now off to his next adventure – starting his undergraduate degree in Natural Sciences at the University of Bath.
I have been working with the Galaxy Zoo team at the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, in Portsmouth, for 8 weeks this summer. I have been analysing the results of Galaxy Zoo 2, and more specifically the region of the sky known as Stripe 82. In this area, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) took many images of the same patch of sky, instead of only one. These images were combined to produce a single, higher quality image, which showed fainter details and objects. Both these deeper images and the standard depth images of stripe 82 were put into galaxy zoo, and I have been comparing the resulting classifications. I learned to code in python, a programming language, and used it to produce graphs from the data I downloaded from the Galaxy Zoo website. I started by comparing the results directly, comparing the number of people who said that the galaxy had features in each of the image depths.
On the graph, each blue dot is a galaxy (there are around 4,000) and the red dashed line shows the overall trend. As you can see from the graph, when the proportion of people who see features is low, there is a good match between the two image depths. However, when the proportion is high, there is a much bigger difference between the two image depths, with the proportion being higher in the deep image. This is because fainter features are visible in the deeper image.
I then plotted graphs of the difference between the proportions (P(Features)) against the brightness of the galaxy. To measure the brightness, I used the apparent magnitude, a measure of how bright the galaxy appears to us (as opposed to how bright it actually is).
The graph below shows the difference in P(Features) plotted against the apparent magnitude. The blue line is at y=0, and the green line represents the average value of the difference between P(Features). As you can see, there is not much difference between the values of P(Features) when the galaxy is particularly bright (Small apparent magnitude) or when it is particularly dim (large apparent magnitude). However, when the galaxy has an average brightness, the difference is quite substantial. We think this is because in bright galaxies, features can be seen in both images, whilst in dim galaxies they can be seen in neither. In medium brightness galaxies, however, they can only be seen in the deeper image. The fact that there are differences between the classifications means that it would be a good idea to classify deeper images of the rest of the sky, to hopefully improve the accuracy of the classifications.
I have greatly enjoyed my time working on at the ICG on galaxy zoo, and would certainly seize the opportunity to pursue it further.
It’s been a pleasure working with Alex this summer. He really impressed me with the speed at which he picked up programming languages. This information about the differences in perception of morphological features between deeper and shallower images is very useful to us as a science team as we plan for future generations of the Galaxy Zoo project with new, more sensitive images from current and ongoing astronomical surveys.
Eight Years and the 8th Most Cited Paper from Galaxy Zoo

At Galaxy Zoo we’re really proud of our publication record – 48 papers and counting, just from the team using your classifications. In academic research one of the most important numbers a published paper has is the number which counts how many citations that paper has – simply a count of the number of other academic publications mention your work.
And we’re not only proud of the Galaxy Zoo publication record, but the citation record is becoming impressive too (if we do say so ourselves). For this post in the lead up to the 8th anniversary of the launch of Galaxy Zoo, here are the 8 most cited of our papers:
1. Lintott et al. 2008: “Galaxy Zoo: morphologies derived from visual inspection of galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey “(with 279 citations)
2. Bamford et al. 2009: “Galaxy Zoo: the dependence of morphology and colour on environment” (219 citations)
3. Lintott et al. 2011: “Galaxy Zoo 1: data release of morphological classifications for nearly 900 000 galaxies” (152 citations)
4. Skibba et al. 2009: “Galaxy Zoo: disentangling the environmental dependence of morphology and colour” (114 citations)
5. Schawinski et al. 2010: “Galaxy Zoo: The Fundamentally Different Co-Evolution of Supermassive Black Holes and Their Early- and Late-Type Host Galaxies” (102 citations)
6. Cardamone et al. 2009: “Galaxy Zoo Green Peas: discovery of a class of compact extremely star-forming galaxies” (101 citations)
7. Darg et al 2010: “Galaxy Zoo: the properties of merging galaxies in the nearby Universe – local environments, colours, masses, star formation rates and AGN activity” (92 citations)
8. Masters et al. 2010: “Galaxy Zoo: passive red spirals” (86 citations)
I’m personally especially proud of paper number 8 on that list, because it is one of the first papers I led making use of Galaxy Zoo classifications (and one of my most cited first author papers in fact). In that paper we explored the properties of the unusually passive (ie. not star forming) red spirals that had been noted in both Bamford et al. 2009 and Skibba et al. 2009. For astronomers this is one of the more well known discoveries from Galaxy Zoo, and these passive red spirals continue to be studied for what they can reveal about the modes of evolution of galaxies in our Universe, and that many spirals must stop forming stars before they lose their spiral structure.
(By the way for academics who might be interested the h-index of Galaxy Zoo is 24).
Explore Galaxy Zoo Classifications
New Images on Galaxy Zoo, Part 1
We’re delighted to announce that we have some new images on Galaxy Zoo for you to classify! There are two sets of new images:
1. Galaxies from the CANDELS survey
2. Galaxies from the GOODS survey
The general look of these images should be quite familiar to our regular classifiers, and we’ve already described them in many previous posts (examples: here, here, and here), so they may not need too much explanation. The only difference for these new images are their sensitivities: the GOODS images are made from more HST orbits and are deeper, so you should be able to better see details in a larger number of galaxies compared to HST.

Comparison of the different sets of images from the GOODS survey taken with the Hubble Space Telescope. The left shows shallower images from GZH with only 2 sets of exposures; the right shows the new, deeper images with 5 sets of exposures now being classified.
The new CANDELS images, however, are slightly shallower than before. The main reason that these are being included is to help us get data measuring the effect of brightness and imaging depth for your crowdsourced classifications. While they aren’t always as visually stunning as nearby SDSS or HST images, getting accurate data is really crucial for the science we want to do on high-redshift objects, and so we hope you’ll give the new images your best efforts.

Images from the CANDELS survey with the Hubble Space Telescope. Left: deeper 5-epoch images already classified in GZ. Right: the shallower 2-epoch images now being classified.
Both of these datasets are relatively small compared to the full Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and Hubble Space Telescope (HST) sets that users have helped us with over the last several years. With about 13,000 total images, we hope that they’ll can be finished by the Galaxy Zoo community within a couple months. We already have more sets of data prepared for as soon as these finish – stay tuned for Part 2 coming up shortly!
As always, thanks to everyone for their help – please ask the scientists or moderators here or on Talk if you have any questions!
Seasons Greetings 2014!
Seasons Greetings for the end of 2014, and many thanks for all the classifications you provided for us at Galaxy Zoo this year!

(made using writing.galaxyzoo.org)
Next Hangout – Thursday March 6th, 12.00pm Taipei Standard Time
Several of the Galaxy Zoo science team are together in Taipei this week for the Citizen Science in Astronomy workshop. If we’ve been a bit quiet it’s because we’re all working hard to get some of the more recent Galaxy Zoo classifications together from all of your clicks into information about galaxies we can make publicly available for science.

Brooke (@vrooje), Kevin (@kevinschawinski) and Zooniverse developer Ed working hard in Taipei on improvements to the process of how we turn your clicks into science papers.
But we thought we’d take this opportunity of all being in the same place to run a live Hangout. We might end up talking a bit about the process of combining multiple clicks into classifications, as well as some of the recent Galaxy Zoo science results. And we’re of course happy to take questions, either as comments below, as Tweets to @galaxyzoo or via the Google+ interface.
We plan to do this during our lunch break – probably about 12.00pm Taipei Standard Time tomorrow (which is, if I can do my sums, 4.00am UK time, or Wednesday 5th March at 11.00pm EST, 8.00pm PST). As usual the video will also be available to watch later: