We’re excited to announce the launch of two new image sets on Galaxy Zoo.

Recently your work has helped us classify 34,429 images coming from the DECaLS first data release (DR1). With the release of DECaLS second data release (DR2) we have added 61,595 new galaxies into Galaxy Zoo. DR2 covers a larger portion of the sky than DR1, and has better quality and deeper images then SDSS. These galaxies are taken from the NASA-Sloan Atlas (a catalog of over 140,000 local galaxies in both the optical and UV) and focuses on the larger and brighter galaxies not already covered by DR1, in addition to the galaxies imaged by an extra year’s worth of data.

Example galaxy taken from DECaLS DR2 sample.

Our second image set, appropriately named “the lost set”, is made up of 25,529 SDSS images that should have been included in Galaxy Zoo 2. These galaxies also come from the NASA-Sloan Atlas, but for one reason or another never made it into Galaxy Zoo until now. Once classified, these images will fill in the hole that currently exists in the bright galaxy data set. These SDSS images are in the queue and will go live sometime later this year, depending on the progress being made on DECaLS DR2.

Example galaxy taken from “the lost set”.

My name is Ross Hart, and I am a second year PhD student at the University of Nottingham using Galaxy Zoo data to study spiral galaxies. I am keen to write some blog posts about these galaxies, which are not only elegant in appearance, but also have a lot of interesting physics associated with them. In this first post, I will give a brief overview of spiral galaxies, and why Galaxy Zoo could be an important tool for their study.

Two-armed spiral galaxy M51 (left) and many-armed galaxy NGC 1232 (right). Image credit (M51): X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: Detlef Hartmann; Infrared: NASA/JPL-Caltech Image credit(NGC 1232): X-ray: NASA/CXC/Huntingdon Institute for X-ray Astronomy/G. Garmire; Optical: ESO/VLT

Spiral galaxies are the most numerous type of galaxy in the local Universe, with approximately 2/3 of local galaxies exhibiting spiral arms. Most of the gas and young stars in the disks of spiral galaxies are located in spiral arms, giving the appearance of the beautiful spiral patterns observed in galaxies such as M51 and NGC 1232 (shown above). However, the reason as to why we study these galaxies is not simply because they are pleasing to the eye; most of the star-formation in the local Universe occurs in spiral galaxies, so understanding the physics of spiral galaxies holds the key to understanding how stars form in galaxies.

Despite the relative prominence and importance of spiral galaxies, we still do not have a good understanding of how spiral galaxies form and evolve. Much of the problem as to why this is the case is that ‘spiral’ is actually far too broad a term to describe galaxies with different types of spiral structure. In particular, most galaxies have two spiral arms in a grand design spiral structure, like that of M51. However, some galaxies have many spiral arms, like NGC 1232.  However, the difference between M51 and NGC 1232 are actually thought to be much deeper than simply the number of arms that the two galaxies have; the physical processes that are responsible for their formation is also thought to be very different.

In order to study spiral galaxies in any level of detail, we require a method of classifying galaxies by the type of spiral structure they have, which requires detailed morphological classifications. It is for this reason that Galaxy Zoo provides an exciting opportunity to compare spiral galaxies in a way that simply hasn’t been possible before. Thanks to all of the volunteers who helped to classify galaxies in Galaxy Zoo 2, we have access to a  sample of spiral galaxies classified with unprecedented size. All of these galaxies have been classified by arm number, so we have the ideal tool for investigating how these different spiral structures form in a level of detail that hasn’t been possible before.

We posted briefly about the 227th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, which several members of the Galaxy Zoo science team attended last week. I wanted to share a little bit more about the research that we presented, and the experiences we had at the meeting.

Asst. Prof Lucy Fortson, PhD student Melanie Galloway, and postdoc Kyle Willett (Univ. of Minnesota) at an evening poster session at the 227th AAS meeting.

Kyle Willett (Postdoc, University of Minnesota)

I presented a poster on the data release of the Galaxy Zoo: Hubble project. While it’s been a couple of years since we formally finished the classifications for GZH, we’ve been working hard in the meantime on aggregating and calibrating the data; this includes two supplementary data sets that users helped classify in the newest interface. One of those sets were the images of galaxies processed with the FERENGI code in order to mimic their appearances at higher redshifts; these have been absolutely critical for the calibration/debiasing procedure we’re applying to the real Hubble galaxies. The second set of new images were the deeper images of galaxies in the GOODS north and south fields, completed early last year. We’re using these to analyze the effect of depth on morphologies, and seeing how the disk/clumpy fractions change with improved imaging.

AAS went well for me, and I got to talk about GZH with a number of new colleagues. I particularly liked having my poster between Melanie Galloway’s and Brooke Simmons’ — I got to point out GZH science results on one side and the next generation of even higher redshift galaxies on the other, which made for a very nice story to tell.

Kyle Willett’s poster at the 227th AAS meeting. Click to download the full PDF.

Melanie Galloway (PhD student, University of Minnesota)

Galaxy Zoo users probably know that there are two main types of galaxies: disks and ellipticals. There is a cool relationship between these shapes and their color: disks tend to be blue (which is an indicator of young stars), while almost all ellipticals appear red (which indicates the stars are old; “red and dead” is a term commonly used.) Astronomers believe that this relationship between color and shape implies that galaxies tend to be created as disks, and over their lifetimes, transform from young disks to old ellipticals. Data from Galaxy Zoo revealed that there are also red disk galaxies in the Universe, and right now it is not known how they fit into our current perception of galaxy evolution.

Mel used data from Galaxy Zoo: Hubble to tackle this question by analyzing how the fraction of red disks changed between now and 6 billion years ago. She found that this fraction was actually much higher in the past! This result probably means that red disks don’t tend to stay red disks, and may instead be a common phase of a typical galaxy’s evolution from blue disk to red elliptical.

Melanie Galloway’s poster at the 227th AAS meeting. Click to download the full PDF.

Melanie Beck (PhD student, University of Minnesota)

At this year’s AAS conference, I presented work which focused on the relationship between galaxies’ masses and their sizes. In general, more massive galaxies are also physically larger (but not always!). However, the mass-size relationship is different for galaxies in the distant universe compared to those in the nearby universe. It’s also different between disk galaxies compared to ellipticals in that the sizes of elliptical galaxies grow much, much faster than those of disk galaxies but don’t seem to grow much in mass. To explain this behavior, models predict that disk galaxies must evolve into elliptical galaxies at a rate that mimics the growth rate of the ellipticals. These models predict that there should be many more elliptical galaxies of a particular size and mass in the nearby universe compared to disks. To test this, we need to keep track of the number of galaxies as a function of mass, size, and type (elliptical or disk) over a large period of time.

My initial work utilizes classifications from Galaxy Zoo 2 separated by Smooth or Features/Disk. All the galaxies in this catalog are considered to be in the local universe. Using sophisticated statistical techniques, I’m able to robustly determine the number of galaxies as a function of mass, size and type. Next I’m applying the same techniques to classifications from Galaxy Zoo: Hubble and Galaxy Zoo: CANDELS as these catalogs contain galaxies from the more and more distant universe. Once we have the analysis from all three we can compare the numbers of galaxies at each time and finally test those models!

Melanie Beck’s poster at the 227th AAS meeting. Click to download the full PDF.

Melanie Beck discussing her poster with Prof. Chris Conselice (Univ. of Nottingham).

Brooke Simmons (Postdoc and Einstein Fellow, UC San Diego)

AAS is always a hectic science bonanza, and presenting a poster is a way of slowing things down a bit: unlike a talk, which is over in 15 minutes or less, you get to have your results up all day. My poster was an introduction to the upcoming release of classifications for the high-redshift CANDELS galaxies, so it shows a basic overview of how the classifications work and an early science result about featureless disks at high redshift.

It was great to present 2 data releases side-by-side, with Kyle’s poster to my left, and it was even better to get to present the result of the volunteers’ efforts. Between these posters and the previous data releases for Galaxy Zoo, we’ve measured the shapes of hundreds of thousands of galaxies (actually, I think it’s over a million!) spanning the last 12 billion years of cosmic time.

Brooke Simmons’ poster at the 227th AAS meeting. Click to download the full PDF.

The “green pea” galaxies were one of the first discoveries of the Galaxy Zoo; they were first noticed by several of our early volunteers, and appeared in a paper led by Carie Cardamone in 2009 (with over 100 citations so far!). They’ve been the subject of a great deal of follow-up research since then, much of which we’ve tried to follow on this blog.

Examples of the green pea galaxies originally discovered in Galaxy Zoo. Top Row: Sloan Digital Sky Survey images. Bottom Row: Hubble Space Telescope images.

A new paper on the Green Peas has just appeared in Nature, one of the most prestigious and widely-read journals in science. A truly international team of researchers (working in Ukraine, Czech Republic, Switzerland, France, Germany, and the United States) made observations of one green pea galaxy, known as J0925+1403, using an ultraviolet spectrograph on the Hubble Space Telescope. They were able to measure emission from what astronomers call “Lyman continuum” photons; this is light produced by massive stars that are solidly in the ultraviolet wavelengths.

The reason this is so important and interesting relates to one of the most fundamental steps in the history of the Universe that astronomers know of. The majority of matter in the Universe is hydrogen (formed shortly after the Big Bang), and much of it exists in diffuse clouds between galaxies, which is called the intergalactic medium. We know from observations that almost all of that hydrogen is currently ionized – that means instead of consisting of a neutral atom with one proton and one electron orbiting it, the average hydrogen atom between galaxies has had its electron stripped away from the proton. This is a big difference because neutral atoms interact with light differently than ionized atoms. If the hydrogen between galaxies were neutral, it would absorb much of the light coming from individual stars and galaxies, making a huge difference in our ability to observe distant objects.

It’s been known for years the Universe is currently ionized; however, about 700 million years after the Big Bang, we know that the Universe used to be neutral. That’s pretty well-established — however, there’s a great deal of debate about what caused the sudden reionization. Something must have produced large numbers of photons that traveled into the intergalactic medium and ionized all of the hydrogen fairly quickly. There have been lots of papers proposing different possible sources for this, including dwarf galaxies, active galactic nuclei, quasars, very early and massive stars, etc.

Diagram illustrating how individual galaxies may have re-ionized the neutral hydrogen in the Universe shortly after the Big Bang. From Erb (2016).

This new paper proposes that green pea galaxies could be responsible for re-ionizing the early Universe. The measurements from this paper show that at least one green pea galaxy is actively emitting photons with sufficient energy to ionize neutral hydrogen. Lots of galaxies can create such radiation, but one unique aspect of the peas is that the photons are escaping the galaxy where they’re being formed. Usually they’re absorbed by dust or gas clouds within the galaxy before they can affect the rest of the Universe. This is the first time that it’s been demonstrated to occur for a green pea galaxy.

The paper (Izotov et al. 2016) is available online. Nature has also published a nice summary at a slightly less technical level to accompany the article that I’d recommend – you can read that here. Please post if you have any questions or want to discuss more about what this means. We’re extremely excited that your discoveries are still yielding new and interesting science!

We’re really excited to report that, with your help, the first batch of galaxy images from the Illustris simulation was finished last week! While we still have plenty of images still available to be classified (both from Illustris and DECaLS), I wanted to explain again how the images are being sorted in Galaxy Zoo and show some of the very early results we’re getting from your classifications.

The galaxies we selected from Illustris were a really big set – after eliminating galaxies which were likely to be too small or dim for accurate visual identification (we did this by filtering on the mass of the galaxies), we had over 110,000 images. In designing this phase of Galaxy Zoo, though, we wanted to try and prioritize the order of the images being shown so that we could do some early science projects along the way, rather than waiting many months for the entire data set to be finished before we started our analysis. This first set of Illustris data included 10,832 images, which were classified a total of more than 430,000 times by Galaxy Zoo volunteers.

One of the main questions we wanted to answer was: “How is the apparent morphology of a galaxy affected by the angle at which it’s viewed?”  This is an important one – for observations of the real Universe, we can’t change the position of our telescope relative to the objects we’re looking at. If a galaxy is edge-on, for example, we’re really limited in being able to determine if there’s a bar, how many spiral arms there are, etc. In Illustris, though, we can change the viewing angle in the simulation! As a result, we might hypothesize that all edge-on disks should be identifiable as spiral or S0 galaxies at all the other viewpoints.

Here’s a quick test I’ve run of that. Using the set of collated classifications that just finished from Illustris, I looked for unique galaxies that were classified as “edge-on disks” from at least 1 of the 4 viewing angles that we have data for. Then I looked at the GZ classifications for the other viewing angles to see if they were still edge-on. Results:

Very close to what we expect! Only about 10% of galaxies had any edge-on classifications; of those, almost all of them are classified as face-on at every other angle (the big bump at N=1 in this plot). The exceptions are where the disk is aligned with two of the virtual cameras — then, we see it as edge-on twice and face-on twice. Since the cameras are oriented like they’re at points of a pyramid with the galaxy at the center, geometry tells us we should expect a typical disk to be edge-on for 0 cameras most of the time, 1 sometimes, 2 very rarely, and never 3 or 4. Just what we see!

Example of a spiral galaxy in Illustris seen from four different viewing angles (“cameras”) in the Galaxy Zoo images. This is a rare case where the galaxy is seen twice as an edge-on disk (upper right, lower left) and twice as a face-on disk (upper left, lower right).

We’re excited to be starting on the analysis phase and are, as always, extremely thankful for your help.