More peas
Back in March I was speaking to a colleague of mine in Nottingham, Seb Foucaud, about the Galaxy Zoo Peas, and showing him Carie’s paper. Seb works primarily on very distant (high redshift) massive galaxies, often using data from the UKIDSS Ultra Deep Survey. He quickly noticed that the way Carie selected Peas from SDSS data was very similar to the way they select high redshift galaxies, except that the exact colours used were different, as more distant galaxies are redder.
The Story of the Peas: writing a scientific paper
Writing the Peas paper has been a great experience for me. I’m still new to the process; its only my 3rd paper and my first with Galaxy Zoo. Kevin and Jordan suggested that I use my experience here to talk a little bit about the process of writing a paper. Every time a paper is written the stages you go through can vary, but I’ll try to describe what we’ve been doing with the Peas paper over the last year. This is a separate perspective from the one Alice is putting together giving the history of the Peas on the Galaxy Zoo Forum.
Latest Galaxy Zoo paper accepted
We are happy to announce that our paper, “Galaxy Zoo: Disentangling the Environmental Dependence of Morphology and Colour”, has been accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the RAS. We showed that much, but not all, of the correlation between a galaxy’s morphology and its large-scale environment can be explained by the correlation between galaxy colour and environment. We also showed that, among red galaxies, galaxies classified as ellipticals are more likely to be located in the central regions of galaxy groups and clusters. Finally, we argued that a relatively large fraction of red spiral galaxies are “satellite” galaxies in groups.
The pre-print of the accepted paper is available on astro-ph.
Finishing that paper II
The Galaxy Zoo AGN host galaxies paper is nearing the final draft stage.
Note to self: when converting a document from British to American spelling, do not just automatically replace all instances of `ise’ with `ize!’
Voorwerps everywhere
I’m delighted to announce that the fifth Galaxy Zoo paper – the one that discusses Hanny’s Voorwerp – has now been accepted for publication by Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
It’s somewhat of a relief to say that, as it was way back in August of last year that we first submitted it. The referee was extremely thorough, catching a few stupid mistakes we’d made (as a good referee should) and in correcting these and responding to responses for clarification the paper grew from four pages to thirteen. The basic story is still the one that Bill and I outlined more than a year ago – we think we’re seeing the result of activity associated with the black hole in the nearby galaxy IC2497 which has now ceased.
Along the way, another team of astronomers have published a paper about their radio observations of the Voorwerp; I’ll blog later in the week about how we think the two sets of observations are compatible. Hopefully they’ll do the same, and we can have a discussion in public about what we do – and don’t – agree on. By coincidence, their paper is being published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics this week – and their image of the Voorwerp made the front cover of the printed edition. We’ll have an image of that for you as soon as anyone involved can find a printed edition – a rare thing in this internet age.
Update : Paper is now available here.
P.S. For those keeping score, our Voorwerp paper was the 5th to be submitted, but the 6th to be accepted.
Update: The pre-print is available on astro-ph now.
Finishing that paper…
When you start to write a paper for publication, you generally think that it will take a fortnight, at most. Naturally, that’s almost always a highly optimistic estimate and it can take months to get a paper into shape for submission to a journal.
I’m currently working on the Galaxy Zoo paper dealing with the host galaxies of AGN (active galactic nuclei – accreting supermassive black holes). Your classifications from Zoo1 are making it possible for us to look at AGN host galaxies in a completely new light and, in particular, see how they’re different from galaxies whose black holes aren’t accreting at the moment. The diagrams and plots are done and the text is now mostly there (10,000 words and counting!), but some of the crucial sections are still very much in the draft stage.
I’ve circulated two earlier drafts with the team to get their comments and suggestions and I’ve mostly finished incorporating them into the text. However, as am writing up the part of the paper where I’m trying to explain what it all means, it’s becoming clear that there’s a lot that the morphologies that your classifications made possible are telling us that’s new and, to be honest, quite mystifying.
That means that I will still have to do some more writing, thinking and discussing with experts on our team on various aspects, all of which of course take time. I started work on this paper in the autumn of 2008, and I’m still working on it. So you can see that getting a scientific paper from an idea to something you can submit can take quite a long time, especially when you start finding things you didn’t expect. And of course, once the paper is finished and submitted to a journal, the process of peer-review begins, which in turn can take weeks, months, or even years.
Eleventh Galaxy Zoo paper submitted!
My colleagues and I are happy to say that the eleventh Galaxy Zoo paper has now been submitted to the journal Astronomy Education Review. The paper is called “Galaxy Zoo: Exploring the Motivations of Citizen Science Volunteers,” and the authors are myself, Georgia Bracey, Pamela, and Chris, Phil, Kevin, Alex, and Jan of the original Galaxy Zoo team. In addition to being the eleventh paper overall, it is also the first paper to study the Galaxy Zoo volunteer community – that is, you!
We are grateful for your collaboration with us even more than usual, because for this paper, you not only classified galaxies, but some of you agreed to give a half-hour of your time to participate in an instant message or phone interview.
As with all the other papers, this paper is being sent out by the journal’s editors to one or more anonymous “peer reviewers” – practicing education researchers who read the paper and recommend that the journal either accept or reject the paper, or (most commonly) request that the authors resubmit the paper after making some improvements. The process can sometimes go a few cycles of changing and resubmitting before the paper is finally accepted. This peer review process helps ensure that scientific studies meet quality standards as judged by the community.
You might have noticed that I haven’t talked about this research on the blog yet, as other team members have done with their research. I wish I could have shared more, but there was an important reason for saving all the explanation until after the paper was submitted. It is well-known in social science research that if the group being studied is aware of the study results, all sorts of unpredictable things can happen.
However, now that the study is over, we can and will gladly share our results. I’ll do that in a series of posts, first by giving a quick summary of what we found, then writing about the ethics of conducting research with people, then about ways to avoid bias in social science, and finally posting a detailed explanation of what we found in the study and what it means.
Now for the quick summary: based on our interviews, we identified 12 motivations that volunteers have given for participating in Galaxy Zoo – 12 reasons why people like you participate. These 12 reasons are:
| Motivation (the category name we used in the paper) | Description (what we said on the survey) |
| 1. Contribute | I am excited to contribute to original scientific research. |
| 2. Learning | I find the site and forums helpful in learning about astronomy. |
| 3. Discovery | I can look at galaxies that few people have seen before. |
| 4. Community | I can meet other people with similar interests. |
| 5. Teaching | I find Galaxy Zoo to be a useful resource for teaching other people. |
| 6. Beauty | I enjoy looking at the beautiful galaxy images. |
| 7. Fun | I had a lot of fun categorizing the galaxies. |
| 8. Vastness | I am amazed by the vast scale of the universe. |
| 9. Helping | I am happy to help. |
| 10. Zoo | I am interested in the Galaxy Zoo project. |
| 11. Astronomy | I am interested in astronomy. |
| 12. Science | I am interested in science. |
We included these motivations in an online survey that many of you took (thanks!), and we are now analyzing the results of that survey to find out which motivations are common and which are rare.
Knowing your motivations for participating will be greatly helpful to us and to other citizen science projects by helping us understand you better. As we understand what appeals to you about Galaxy Zoo, we can design future Zoos to meet those needs and wants. So, this research is helping us create the best Zoos we can create for you.
I really enjoyed doing the interviews, and going through all your forum responses. It’s clear that many of you have many different reasons for being a part of Galaxy Zoo, and many different and eloquent ways of expressing your reasons. A few of the reasons that you gave as part of the forum discussion stuck out in my mind. One of you said “just knowing how small you are is something that’s really hard to explain.” Another said “getting to know, at least a little, some fans and professionals in the GalaxyZoo community.” Another of you said “I’m so proud to be with You, the whole project, to be a part of something bigger than wars or politics. Because science and discovering the truth are the only things that matter.” And there were many, many others.
It’s been a real pleasure getting to know so many of your reasons for being a part of this great enterprise we call Galaxy Zoo, and we’re looking forward to continuing to work with all of you!
Dust pathfinding with Galaxy Zoo
Now that spring classes are over, I’m catching up with lots of things. These include making color-composite images from our latest observations at the WIYN 3.5-meter telescope in Arizona done to follow up overlapping-galaxy pairs from the Forum. Here are three samples, showing how much more detail we can see with long exposures one the objects have been found from the SDSS data. In SDSS J215311.30-073533.5, the WIYN images show just the kind of thing we’re looking for – dust in spiral arms silhouetted against the light of the background galaxy. First here is the SDSS image, then the WIYN picture below it.
SDSS 2153-07 WIYN image
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Pictures from AAS
The AAS meeting just ended, and in a few minutes I’ll be giving Lucy from the Zoo Education Team a ride to Caltech, which is just down the street. Georgia sent me some photos from the three Galaxy Zoo education posters that we presented here.
Here is my poster, describing the irregular galaxies project:
Here is Pamela’s poster describing the results of our survey into the reasons you participate in Galaxy Zoo:
And, last but not least, here is Georgia’s poster describing our plans for future user testing of the Zoo 2 website:
It was a very successful meeting, and a lot of people came by the poster to ask questions or share their own results.
I’m headed back home at 11 PM tonight. It’s been a great trip, but I’m looking forward to going home!
Watch the AAS Citizen Science session now!
The International Year of Astronomy citizen science session at AAS is going on *right now*! Pamela’s team is live-streaming the session. You can see it at http://tinyurl.com/mmm5n4 .
Galaxy Zoo 