Two recent things:

1) Owing to the poor weather, we’ve had to put in another application to the 30m dish this summer. I shall be sure to track down the fox’s lair with the snow gone in search of my lost champagne. We’ve also submitted a sample of spiral-spiral mergers to be viewed by the William Hershel Telescope on the Canary Islands as part of a ‘Do spirals survive mergers’ project. Should lead to some stunning images if succesful.

2) The original merger paper got split into two because there was so much in it! These were recently placed on Astroph for the whole scientific community to see. You can find them here and here here.

Hopefully the referee will give the go ahead soon for their full publication in the journal MNRAS. We’ll keep you posted!

After the first day of Galaxy Zoo’s 100 hours of astronomy challenge, the response has been excellent. The Zoonometer ™ stands just short of 330,000, so we’re on course and nearly a third of the way there. Of course, the first part is easy, but how will you all do over the long haul?

During the lifetime of Galaxy Zoo, we’ve been continually stunned by the response from you, the Galaxy Zoo community, to our requests for help. That said, we thought it was about time we raised the bar and gave you an actual target to aim for, and the International Year of Astronomy’s showpiece event, the 100 hours of Astronomy is the perfect excuse.We’re challenging you to complete 1 million clicks in Galaxy Zoo 2 during the 100 hours. They actually started at midday Greenwich Mean Time, so we’re already underway – as you’ll see if you go to the site to observe our new Zoonometer ™  So if you need a little extra excuse to spend more time on the site this weekend, to drag your friends to Galaxy Zoo, or just a little extra motivation (watching the classifications tick up is very relaxing) then you now have no reason to wait. Get clicking!

Shortly after the Galaxy Zoo Forum was launched, Vanny diagnosed a serious condition among many users: Galaxyzooitis. Symptoms include red eyes and tiredness, a lack of interest in the real world, expecting to see mergers, asteroids and satellites in the sky, seeing galaxies whenever the eyes are closed, an inability to stop talking about galaxies (a secondary symptom of this is incomprehensibility and a new reputation for nerdiness in the family), and, finally, an enhanced ability to see (and classify!) galaxies in Earthly phenomena such as clouds, writing and coffee.

This led to a collaboration between myself and NGC3314, Georgia, Archi, Caro, Infinity, Milk_n_cookies, Paddy, Pat, Scaryitalian, Sophie 378 and Thornius, all of the Galaxy Zoo Forum. We have discovered a new class of galaxy, namely the Galacticat.

Read More…

This morning the latest paper from Galaxy Zoo appeared on astro-ph — “Galaxy Zoo: an unusual new class of galaxy cluster”. Authored by two of the Galaxy Zoo team’s newest recruits, Marven F. Pedbost and Trillean Pomalgu, this four-page paper presents a remarkable new discovery, which may require us to revise our fundamental ideas about either our place in the universe or the occurrence of unlikely events. The abstract gives a concise summary:

We have identified a new class of galaxy cluster using data from the Galaxy Zoo project. These clusters are rare, and thus have apparently gone unnoticed before, despite their unusual properties. They appear especially anomalous when the morphological properties of their component galaxies are considered. Their identification therefore depends upon the visual inspection of large numbers of galaxies, a feat which has only recently been made possible by Galaxy Zoo, together with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We present the basic properties of our cluster sample, and discuss possible formation scenarios and implications for cosmology.

To find out more, you can download a pdf file of the paper here.

Last week, I had the opportunity to visit Apache Point Observatory, where the photons providing data for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey are gathered safely to Earth and their final digital form. The observatory is situated at the edge of a ridge in the Sacramento Mountains of New Mexico, near the solar observatory complex at Sunspot. (Back when that was built, the astronomers obviously had a hand in picking the route number of the highway leading from the town of Cloudcroft – spectrum aficionados will recognize the New Mexico highway number). At its elevation of 2800 meters (9200 feet), there were still patches of snow despite being able to look out across desert below. The steep western face of the mountains looks out across the White Sands, both the gypsum-rich dune field and the historic rocket test range of the same name (and the landing strip once used by a space shuttle when the weather was terrible on both coasts of the US). Read More…

Bill’s been on his travels again, and will be blogging about the trip soon. In the meantime, where in the world is the GZ banner being proudly lifted aloft?

As we reported earlier this month, we’ve been awarded 75 ksec (or just under 21 hours) of Suzaku time. Suzaku is a Japanese-led space telescope that observes hard X-rays. Hard X-rays have the handy property of penetrating just about everything, even the most messy gas and dust that tends to collect in the centres of galaxies and around supermassive black holes. We’re pointing Suzaku and its instruments at IC 2497, the massive galaxy next to Hanny’s Voorwerp.  

There are two possible outcomes for this observation that we can think of: if we do detect some hard X-ray photons, then we know that there is still an active supermassive black hole in IC 2497 that’s illuminating the Voorwerp. It’s merely hidden behind a tremendous amount of gas and dust. If on the other hand we don’t pick up anything, then we can be sure that the black hole has stopped feeding, i.e. it has genuinely shut down. 

Usually, telescopes like Suzaku call for new observations every year or so to fill the next year. Our observations could therefore have been scheduled any time between later this spring and spring 2010. So we were extremely excited that our observations have been scheduled for the week of April 13th! That’s amazingly lucky! Barring telescope technical trouble or targets of opportunity (Look! A bright new unknown kind of supernova!), we’ll get our data sometime in April or May. Fingers crossed…

The first two editions of Galaxy Zoo 2’s Top Ten Galaxies produced a  shocking result. Sitting proudly on top in both cases was a completely undistinguished elliptical.Things are different now; a new entry to the chart has taken first place, and so we proudly present Galaxy Zoo’s new favourite galaxy :To encourage you to make friends with more galaxies, we’ll change the rules from here on in; we’ll only count galaxies which are favourited between top ten updates. Next time’s chart might look very different – and we might have a different number 1.