Galaxy Zoo Quench – Experience the Full Scientific Process
Experience Science from Beginning to End! Classify, Analyze, Discuss, and Collaboatively Write an Article!
Galaxy Zoo and other Zooniverse projects have given thousands the opportunity to contribute to scientific research. It’s time to take the role of volunteers to the next level. For the next two months*, this new Galaxy Zoo Quench project provides the opportunity to take part in the ENTIRE scientific process – everything from classifying galaxies to analyzing results to collaborating with astronomers to writing a scientific article!
Galaxy Zoo Quench will examine a sample of galaxies that have recently and abruptly quenched their star formation. These galaxies are aptly named Post-Quenched Galaxies. They provide an ideal laboratory for studying how galaxies evolve from blue, star-forming spiral galaxies to red, non-star-forming elliptical galaxies. Using the more than a million galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, we identified ~3000 post-quenched galaxies. By classifying these galaxies and analyzing the results, we will explore the mechanisms that quenched their star formation and investigate the role of post-quenched galaxies in galaxy evolution.
The entire process of classifying, analyzing, discussing, and writing the article will take place over an 8 week period*, beginning July 18th. After classifying the galaxies, volunteers will use the tools available within Zooniverse to plot the data and look for trends. Through reading articles and interaction in Talk, volunteers will gain background information. Throughout, they’ll discuss with the science team their interpretation of the results. At the end of the process, volunteers and the science team will collaboratively write a 4-page Astrophysical Journal article.
What causes the star formation in these galaxies to be quenched? How do interactions impact galaxy evolution? What is the fate of our Milky Way? Join us this Summer (or Winter if you’re below the equator!) in exploring these questions, being a part of the scientific process, and contributing to our understanding of this dynamic phase of galaxy evolution!
CLICK HERE TO PARTICIPATE!
We’ll be sharing more details about this project during the next Galaxy Zoo Hangout, on Monday, July 15th at 14:00 CST / 19:00 GMT / 20:00 BST. Have questions about the project? Post them here or tweet at us (@galaxyzoo). Just before the Hangout starts, we’ll embed the video here so you can watch from the blog.
The best way to send us a comment during the live Hangout is through twitter (@galaxyzoo). You can also leave a comment on this blog post, or on Google Plus, Facebook or YouTube. See you soon!
Update: here’s the hangout (and the mp3 version)!
*Note: science timelines often subject to a factor of two uncertainty. We’ll do our best to keep on track, at the same time expecting the unexpected (all part of the fun of doing science!).
Zooniverse Live Chat
This just in: join the Zooniverse (including Galaxy Zoo) for a live hangout tomorrow from Chicago!
A small team of scientists and developers from across the Zooniverse are gathered at Adler Planetarium in Chicago this week to pitch and work on ideas for advanced tools for some of your favorite Zooniverse projects. Our goal is to come up with some tools and experiences that will help the Zooniverse volunteers further explore, beyond the scope of the main classification interfaces, the rich datasets behind the projects in new and different ways. As part of the three days of hacking, there will be a live chat with representatives from Galaxy Zoo, Planet Hunters, Snapshot Serengeti, and Planet Four (as well as a special guest or two) tomorrow Thursday July 11th at 2pm CDT ( 3 pm EDT, 8 pm BST). We’ll also give you an inside peek into the US Zooniverse Headquarters on the floor of the Adler Planetarium where much of the coding and…
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Updates to Talk
The good news: the developers are currently hard at work migrating Talk to the latest version, which has many improvements over the old version. When the update is finished, the Talk home page will contain lots more information about each new post (including thumbnails!), the discussions should be easier to navigate, and the collections will be easier to navigate and manage — just for a start. We’ve been looking forward to this upgrade for a while, and once it’s completed it will make discussions of your discoveries even better.
The bad news: Talk will be down for a few hours while the upgrade actually takes place. And, as with any significant update that includes changing the way your favorite website appears on a page, it may take some getting used to. But hang in there and you’ll find your way around. Also, please feel free to ask questions, either here or on Talk itself. (Also also, thanks for bearing with us.)
The other good news: The main classification site isn’t affected at all — so you can still classify galaxies to your heart’s content, without interruption!
How to Translate Galaxy Zoo
Not too long ago we announced that Galaxy Zoo has gone open source – along with several other Zooniverse projects. Part of that announcement was that it is now possible for anyone to translate the Galaxy Zoo website into their own language and have that pulled back into the main site. We love translation at the Zooniverse! Using GitHub (our code repository) means we can open up the translation process to everyone.
I’ve been answering a lot of emails about how this process works so I thought I would outline a tutorial here on the blog. To get started go to: https://github.com/zooniverse/Galaxy-Zoo/tree/master/public/locales and download the .json file corresponding to your language. If there is not yet one there you have two options:
- Clone the app locally from GitHub and run the translate.rb file in root
- If step 1 doesn’t make any sense then contact rob@zooniverse.org and we can create the file for you.
These JSON files are tree structures of strings in “key”: “value” pairs that contain all the translatable text on Galaxy Zoo. You need to translate just the values , which are the parts after the colon (:) shown in bold in the example chunk of the file below.
{
“zooniverse”: {
“browser_check”: {
“wont_work”: “This site probably won’t work until you update your browser.”,
“recommended”: “We recommend using <a href=\”http://www.mozilla.org/firefox/\” target=\”_blank\”>Mozilla Firefox</a> or <a href=\”http://www.google.com/chrome\” target=\”_blank\”>Google Chrome</a>.”,
“ie”: “If you use <a href=\”http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/\” target=\”_blank\”>Microsoft Internet Explorer</a>, make sure you’re running the latest version.”,
“chrome_frame”: “If you can’t install the latest Internet Explorer, try <a href=\”http://google.com/chromeframe\” target=\”_blank\”>Chrome Frame</a>!”,
“dismiss”: “Dismiss”
},
…
You do not translate the parts before the colon as these are the keys that are used to identify each string. so in the example you do not translate “zooniverse”, “browser_check”, “won’t_work, “recommended”, “ie”, “chrome_frame” or “dismiss”. Here’s the Spanish version of the above segment of the file:
{
“zooniverse”: {
“browser_check”: {
“wont_work”: “Es probable que este sitio no funcione hasta que actualices tu navegador.”,
“recommended”: “Te recomendamos usar <a href=\”http://www.mozilla.org/firefox/\” target=\”_blank\”>Mozilla Firefox</a> o <a href=\”http://www.google.com/chrome\” target=\”_blank\”>Google Chrome</a>.”,
“ie”: “Si utilizas <a href=\”http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/\” target=\”_blank\”>Microsoft Internet Explorer</a>, asegúrate que estés usando la última versión.”,
“chrome_frame”: “Si no puedes instalar la última versión de Internet Explorer, intenta usar <a href=\”http://google.com/chromeframe\” target=\”_blank\”>Chrome Frame</a>!”,
“dismiss”: “Dismiss”
},
…
Note that any quotation marks need to be escaped i.e. ” becomes \” – these files have to be valid JSON and there is a handy online tool for validating this at http://jsonlint.com/ – here you can paste in the whole file and it will tell you where there are any formatting errors if you have any.
There is very little scope for doing language-specific formatting on the website. This means that if text is too long when it’s been translated it may run off the page or be cut-off on the screen. Because of this, you need to keep the translated strings to approximately the same length. If this causes issues let us know. To test out the translation and see how it looks, which you’re welcome to do ant any time, you can either email your current file to rob@zooniverse.org or run the Galaxy Zoo app locally by cloning it from GitHub (https://github.com/zooniverse/Galaxy-Zoo/).
We also have an email list for Zooniverse Translators. If you’d like to join it in order to ask questions of other translators and hear about other projects you might want to translate then email rob@zooniverse.org. If you are planning on doing a translation it would be worth joining the list to coordinate with other translators in your language.
NOTE: If you’re familiar with GitHub, you can clone the Galaxy Zoo repo, create a local JSON file for your language and just submit a Pull Request when you’re ready. You can find the translation-creator script here.
When your translation is complete will find find an astronomer somewhere in the world who speaks your language, in order to double-check (peer-review!) the new text and give feedback. This is done to ensure that the site is still conveying the original meaning and acts as a good error-checking mechanism.
Good luck with your translation, and thank you! Hopefully we can open up Galaxy Zoo to many more people around the world.
Cross Post from the Zooniverse Blog: Galaxy Zoo is Open Source
I just wanted to add a link to a post by Zooniverse Technical Director Arfon Smith over on the Zooniverse blog:
Please go there to read it.
This development means coders can “fork” their own versions of the Galaxy Zoo code and help (for example) translate the site into other languages, providing another way for people to contribute to the great science coming out of Galaxy Zoo.
Using Galaxy Zoo in the Classroom
Recently Jen Gupta, ICG Portsmouth’s Outreach Officer, wrote a very useful description of Navigator, a new tool for using Galaxy Zoo in the classroom (brought to you by Zooteach).
Jen’s excellent post shows many example screenshots of Navigator at work, and goes into much more detail about how to use it. Read Jen’s post here.
I’ve now used Navigator twice, once for an open evening in Oxford and once for a STEM festival at a school in Hampshire. The formats were very different: at the student open evening we gave 15-minute presentations that included classifying and then using Navigator to show and discuss the students’ classifications. The festival had about 1700 attendees in total, and Zooniverse was just one exhibit, so we had people wandering in and out in groups large and small. In Oxford we set up several computers for the students to use, and at the festival we had several iPads to go along with the desktop machine hooked up to the projector. But all were classifying in the group, and as the day went on we amassed more and more classifications to talk about.
So far I’ve found Navigator is really useful for two things in particular:
- Discussing classification difficulties and distributions: the My Galaxies tool will show you how the group’s classification of a particular galaxy compares to whatever other classifications exist for that object. Sometimes a galaxy has one clear classification that stands out, and other times it looks like nobody really agrees about whether it’s smooth versus featured. You can use that to talk about why it’s important to have so many people classify one galaxy, and how it relates to how confident you are in your own classification (and why it means you should still classify even if you aren’t sure).
- Making and testing predictions: The open night was for students about age 10, so many of them didn’t really even know what a galaxy was. The festival had students of all ages and plenty of adults as well. I showed some examples and explained that astronomers think elliptical (smooth) galaxies are made by merging two smaller galaxies together in a violent collision. From that you can predict that smooth galaxies should be bigger and brighter than featured galaxies on average, if you often make a smooth galaxy by crashing two featured galaxies together. You can use the Histogram tool to plot absolute brightness of smooth versus featured galaxies and see whether that prediction turns out to be true. (But remember that with magnitudes, more negative actually means brighter!)
I’m still pretty new to using Navigator, but I can already tell it’s a powerful educational tool and I can’t wait to see what people do with it!
More Hubble Features, and More Often!
Here at Zooniverse HQ we’ve been thinking a bit more about those “fuzzy blobs” we talked about during our last hangout. Many of those faint galaxies are among the most distant objects we’ve ever seen, so we really want to learn about how they’ve formed and what they look like, but in some cases they are just too faint to get a really detailed classification. We can probably learn what their overall shape is, and possibly tell whether they’re disturbed or interacting, but spiral arms? Bars? Bulge strength? Not likely. Read More…
Next GZ Hangout: Wednesday, 10th April, 19:00 GMT
We’re trying a new time for our hangouts to make it easier for those of our viewers in North America to tune in live. Our next live hangout will be on Wednesday the 10th of April at 7 pm GMT. That’s 9 pm in Europe, 8 pm in the UK, 3 pm EDT and 12 pm PDT. Even if you live in Hawaii you won’t have to skip your morning cuppa to hang out with us (9 am HST)!
Update: The video link and the summary post (also with a video link) are here.
If you have any questions you’d like the science team to answer live on the air, please feel free to leave a comment below, or tweet them directly @galaxyzoo. During the hangout, if we use a term you’re not familiar with, you can use the jargon gong by tweeting at us too. For example, “@galaxyzoo GONG laser guide star” would have been perfectly appropriate during the last hangout. Go on… gong us! We like it!
Next Galaxy Zoo Hangout: 22 Feb, 15:30 GMT
Next Galaxy Zoo Hangout: Friday, the 22nd of February, 2013, 3:30 p.m. GMT
We got a lot of good questions for the last live chat — keep ’em coming! Post your questions below and/or feel free to tweet them @galaxyzoo.
Shortly before the hangout starts, we’ll embed the video in this post so you can watch from here. And during the chat, if we use a science term you aren’t familiar with, please use the Jargon Gong by tweeting us with a GONG (example: “@galaxyzoo GONG spiral density wave”); we’ll be happy to stop and explain!
Update: The summary of the hangout, and the video, are now here.
Live Chat: Galactic Rings, Secular Evolution and The Good Old Days
It’s amazing what happens when you actually publicize your live chat in advance. We got so many questions, we decided to spend the entire chat just discussing them, and we still didn’t finish!
Partly that’s because we had a surprise guest appearance from the esteemed Ron Buta, who came in just after we had talked about some of the details covered in his Galaxy Morphology article (his Figure 3 is shown in the image). Ron worked with Gérard de Vaucouleurs — aka GdV — and told us some amusing stories about trying to take photometric* observations of dwarf galaxies, and about how GdV’s wife used to disagree with his morphologies, at one point looking over his shoulder and proclaiming, “no, there’s no ring”. I rather liked that story as it’s a reminder that anyone can spot patterns in galaxy images.
We’ll try to answer those questions on the previous blog post that we didn’t get to there — but in the meantime, here’s the video:
Left to right: Ron Buta & Bill Keel, Karen Masters, Kevin Schawinski, Brooke Simmons (me). Toward the end (not shown on the thumbnail), Kyle Willett arrived just in time to answer a question about the status of the latest Galaxy Zoo classification set.
We made ample use of the jargon gong on ourselves, but we may not have managed to define all the terms Ron used. We’ll try to do so in this post — if we’ve missed any please say so in the comments!
*photometry = precise quantitative measurements of the brightness of objects in the sky. You need very good observing conditions to take photometric measurements, which many (but not all) astronomical projects require.
Update: Now in podcast form:
Galaxy Zoo 