This post is part of a series about the new Galaxy Zoo site. It is also part of Citizen Science September at the Zooniverse.

We are happy to announce that along with the new Galaxy Zoo release, we are also launching a new version of our Zooniverse astronomy survey. The new surveys were updated based on the many suggestions and responses we received from previous participants.

We are asking for your help so that we can develop a better understanding of the Galaxy Zoo participant base’s ideas in astronomy. The results from the new surveys will also be used to inform the development of Galaxy Zoo user tools and future science investigations. Looking forward, we will continue to conduct investigations that help Zooniverse create programs that promote even greater involvement from the citizen science community and allow for all involved to make even more profound scientific discoveries. Note that the information we gather for this work will remain anonymous.

Users of the new Galaxy Zoo will receive an invitation to “opt-in” to participate in taking the surveys as they are classifying. If you agree to help you will be given short surveys that contain 6 multiple-choice questions, which you can answer at your own pace. You can answer all the sets at once or take one set every week. Whatever works best for you. You can also opt-in to take quizzes by visiting your profile page.

Thank you again for participating and enjoy the new and improved Galaxy Zoo!

– The Galaxy Zoo Education Team

This post, from project lead Mark Sullivan of Oxford, is one of three marking the end of this phase of the Galaxy Zoo : Supernova project. You can hear from Joey Richards of PTF here, and from the Zooniverse team here.

Since August 2009, Galaxy Zoo Supernovae has been helping astronomers in the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) find exploding stars, or supernovae, in imaging data taken with a telescope in Southern California. This project has been tremendously successful – Galaxy Zoo Supernovae has uncovered hundreds of supernovae in the PTF data that would otherwise have been missed. These discoveries have directly resulted in scientific publications, with many more in the pipeline, and have been observed on telescopes all over the world, including the 4.2-metre William Herschel Telescope. For example, my colleague Dr. Kate Maguire’s paper includes 8 supernovae found by the Zoo, which were subsequently observed using the Hubble Space Telescope. This allowed her to examine the ultraviolet properties of several thermonuclear ‘type Ia’ supernovae, the same type as those used in the original discovery of dark energy and the accelerating universe. The ultraviolet is a probe of the composition of the exploding star, and allowed her to test whether type Ia supernova properties change with time as the universe ages and becomes enriched with heavy elements.

But – all good things must come to an end. One of the goals of Galaxy Zoo Supernovae was to use the Zoo classifications to improve the algorithms that surveys such as PTF use to find supernovae automatically. And the good news is that, after two years of hard work, we have managed to do just that. The full details are explained in a separate blog posting by Dr. Joey Richards at the University of California at Berkeley.

I’d like to take this opportunity, on behalf of everyone involved with PTF, to thank you all for your time and effort in classifying these supernovae for us. We realise how much effort you’ve put in, and it has been very much appreciated.

For those of you who have become addicted to supernovae, don’t panic – there may be further supernova-related projects in a few months time. In the mean-time, watch this space for more publications based on Galaxy Zoo Supernovae discoveries!

I’ve given a couple of public talks recently on results on galaxy evolution from Galaxy Zoo (at the Hampshire Astronomical Group, and the Winchester Science Festival) and one of the things I like to point out is the quantity and variety of science results we’re getting out. To illustrate that I made the below wordl of words appearing in the abstracts of all the peer reviewed science papers the Galaxy Zoo science team have put out.

This is based on the 30 papers about astronomical objects submitted up until July 2012. I just missed Brooke’s first financial reform paper submitted by a day or two, and I love that this was out of date just as soon as I made it. 🙂

I realise I should sort out things like per cent – percent, and galaxy, Galaxy, galaxies technically being the same thing. But still I think it’s interesting to look out.

Over at the brand new Lens Zoo project blog we are starting to document our progress towards a new zoo being built this autumn – a zoo for finding gravitational lenses! A small but dedicated band of lens hunters has been active on the Galaxy Zoo forum for several years – while we are still working with them on the objects they have found so far, we’d also like to help them extend their science investigations by providing new data and new tools in the new zoo. If you’ve  spent time on the forums looking for rare objects like lenses, or have stumbled across something unusual that has led to an interesting adventure in the Galaxy Zoo, we’d like to hear from you – we’re trying to figure out how to help you make one-in-a-thousand discoveries.

So: what features should the Lens Zoo website have, to help us find as many lenses as possible? We are planning a workshop in mid-July to discuss the interface and tools for the new Zoo, and to give us something to talk about, we’d love to hear from all you lens-hunters out there. We’ve setup a web form for you to send us any ideas about functionality or tools that you think would be useful in finding lenses. Here’s the address in full:

http://tinyurl.com/lens-zoo-survey

We’ll go through all your ideas when we meet up in Zurich, and keep you posted on the Lens Zoo blog!

Stay tuned, and thanks for your help.

Phil, Aprajita & the Lens Zoo team

Merger Zoo has come to a close.

Since the project started, we have had over 27,000 volunteers contributed their time supporting this project.   Volunteers have reviewed over 3 million simulations.  Out of this huge number of new simulations, we have been able to find the best models for each of 60 different merging galaxy systems using the data you generated in the Merger Wars and Simulation Showdown interfaces.

The two images above show an overlay for two of the best simulation from Merger Zoo.   As the image fades between the simulation and the astronomical image, you can see how closely we matched the shapes of the real Merging Galaxies.   Of course, the underlying purpose of this Merger Zoo was not to make pretty models.   We are now in the process of analyzing the incredibly rich data set that has been generated to address a number of scientific questions.

The first paper we are working on addresses a simple question – how well can the orbit of the mergers be constrained from the shape of the tidal features?   For decades we have been assuming that there is a true “best fit” orbital match for interacting galaxies.    However, Merger Zoo has directly put this to a test.   As an example, take a look at the plot below.    The red line shows the distribution of different disk crossing angles (inclinations) from all the orbits that were viewed by our volunteers.   The green line shows the states that were actually selected and survived the first rounds of the Merger War’s competition on the site.    Even though none of the volunteers ever look at the inclination angle, the states our volunteers have selected are converging toward a single best angle.

The uniqueness of merger orbits is only the first of many of papers that we are working on.   We are also looking how the star formation rates in mergers depend on the orbits between the two galaxies.  We have come a long way on this analysis, and seem to be close to some nice results.   We are also looking at ways to automatically model merging galaxies using computer vision.   The Citizen Science data from Merger Zoo will be used as the training set for the computer vision program.

When Anthony and I look at this Merger Zoo today, we are thrilled with the quality and quantity of the data that you have generated in this project.   I have wanted to have models for a large system of galaxy interactions for decades to test some of these difficult questions.     Without your help, creating this set of models would not have been possible.    With all these data that has generated, the hard work for Anthony and I is really just beginning.   We will be spending our time to make sure we turn your time and effort into scientific knowledge.   Of course, we will keep you informed as this process continues and results are published.

Thank you for all your help in this project!

John and Anthony, The Merger Zoo Team

Observing Time Update from Ivy Wong:

The majority of the galaxies that we observe can be divided distinctly into 2 categories: star-forming spirals (late-types) and non-star-forming spheroidals (early-types). The purpose of my research is to study how one type of galaxies transform into the other. In a previous Zoo project, we studied a sample of local post-starburst galaxies— galaxies which have only recently stopped forming stars. Even though star formation has only recently ceased for these transition-type galaxies, they already have the same shape as that of non-star-forming galaxies.

To further investigate how the shape of a galaxy correlates with its colour (or star formation history), we now focus our efforts onto a sample of blue early-type galaxies (found by Zookeeper Kevin) which are thought to be the progenitors of the post-starburst galaxies. Blue early-types are unusual relative to regular early-types because they appear to still be forming stars. Why are they still forming stars? Did a recent interaction trigger this new wave of star formation ?

In other studies that I have made of nearby galaxies, I have found that studying the gas content (atomic hydrogen; HI) of galaxies is a good way of finding evidence for past interactions as well as a good way of finding galaxies which are still forming stars. This is because stars are formed from an initial reservoir of gas. The gas reservoir of a galaxy is highly sensitive to environmental effects and will show tell-tale features such as tidal tails and bridges which can point to external factors affecting the galaxy’s evolution.

We recently proposed for observing time to use the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (Netherlands) to map the HI content of a sample of 6 Northern blue early-types. It is extremely difficult to map HI because the emission comes from the spin-flip of the electron in the Hydrogen atom. We recently found out that we have gotten some non-guaranteed time to use the WSRT so in the event that all goes well, I hope to post some HI maps of these blue early-types.