Galaxy Zoo: Understanding Cosmic Mergers
Starting at midnight 11/24, our new site ‘Galaxy Zoo: Understanding Cosmic Mergers’ went on-line as a new project in Galaxy Zoo. In Mergers, we are working to understand the cosmic collisions that lead to galaxy mergers. Every day we will have a new target galaxy that we need your help to model. Based on the basic input parameters that we provide, a Java applet running in your browser will simulate some possible collision scenarios. Computers don’t do a good job comparing simulations and real astronomical images, so we need your help to find out which simulations are the most similar to the real galaxy collision.
Working on Mergers will require some patience. Some of the collisions we are trying to model are rarer than others, so don’t get discouraged. In some cases, you will need to look at a few hundred images to get your first close match. Just remember, you aren’t looking for perfection. Just try to find a simulation that has some of the unusual and unique tidal features of the target galaxy. When you found something close, you might want to go further and “enhance” the image to make even a better match. The more data we have on these galactic collisions, the more we can narrow down the input parameters that caused these systems to form. You can be the most helpful by looking at a lot of images and then select the best of the best through the evaluate mode of the applet. This will happen automatically when you have selected eight possible merger images.
My graduate student Anthony Holincheck and I have been working on this project for a long time, and are very excited to see it see it launch today. We want to thank all the Zooites that participated in our beta test. Zooites rock! Of course, thanks also go out to Arfon, Chris, Lucy, Nancy, Geza, and Mark in their work in the development. Without all of your help, this project would not be possible. Our team will be adding more features in the coming weeks and months, so please stay tuned.
As I write this blog, we are T-5 hours before the full launch of our site. I cannot help but be humbled by the incredible dedication of the Zooites. With your help, we are going to model the dynamics of hundreds of galaxy collisions. This effort will help us connect the dynamics of galaxy collision to the star formation rates in galaxies. Thank you for your on-going support Galaxy Zoo!
– John Wallin – Computational Scientist/Astronomer
New images in the Zoo
As you may already have heard, Galaxy Zoo has new images in it this week!
You may remember my post in September which described how we’ve added images from SDSS’s ‘Stripe 82’. This is an area of the Sloan survey that has been repeatedly imaged to do things like supernova detection (much like that in Supernova Zoo – you have to look at the same place more than once to see what has changed). A benefit of this is that we can add all these images up to make an image that’s like having a much longer exposure than the ordinary SDSS uses.
Get in the queue! – Scaling Galaxy Zoo
Did anyone notice that ‘My Galaxies’ got a little out of date earlier this week? If you did then you might like to hear a blow-by-blow technical explanation over here.
Cheers
Arfon
Supernova Zoo news
Thanks to all of you who participated in our second trial of the supernova hunt! As with our first trial in August, it was very successful, and kept our WHT observers, Jakob and Isobel, very busy – as you can see from their blogs! In the 3 days that we ran the trial, 2089 of you inspected over 2000 supernova candidates, answering more than 100,000 classification questions. The best of these were then passed to WHT for observation.
The first observing night had relatively poor observing conditions, but the second night was clear and plenty of zoo targets were observed. You can see a selection of the supernovae that you found and that were observed at WHT on the supernova zoo front page. Using the spectrograph on WHT, we were able to confirm these as supernovae and determine their types. We took spectra of more than 20 candidates identified by the zoo, and are now busy reducing and analysing that data.
Our plan now is to take the supernova hunt down for a short while, to make improvements to the tutorial and classification questions. Please do keep the feedback coming – the supernova zoo now has its own sub-forum where you can give us comments, and we will try to answer any questions that you might have. Our goal to have to supernova zoo support all of our Palomar Transient Factory supernova observing runs – and not just those at WHT – in the near future.
Thanks for all of your help!
Mark
Good morning
Almost all candidates on the list have been observed. Some were junk, but most were something real, like a supernova, an AGN, or a star. Now we only have to take some calibration data and burn the data to a dvd. I’m really looking forward to a few hours sleep. Good night!
/Jakob
The hunt goes on
The atmospheric conditions have degraded a bit, but we’re still collecting data.
Wiggles
Features of supernova spectra are very broad and therefore look like wiggles. Tonight we’re indeed lucky. All the spectra apears to have these wiggles in them. We’ve found a few type Ia supernova so far tonight. Apparently the selection of candidates via the supernova Zoo has been very effective.
/Jakob
Fantastic seeing
We’re lucky! Clear skies. The seeing is marvelous which means that we can obtain very good spectra.
/Jakob
Excellent conditions
The conditions are now excellent (seeing of 0.7 arcseconds). I hope it stays like this all night. This is really exciting!
/Jakob
Awaiting the sunset
We’re sitting in the control room of WHT awaiting the sunset. Before sunset we should take some calibration data and finalise the list of candidates. New candidates are sent to us by e-mail all the time. Tonight we’ll have a go at some candidates we didn’t observe yestereday or need to get an additional spectrum of. There are som very faint challenging targets we still haven’t decided whether to include or not. The wheather is much better to night. Almost no clouds at all. This is going to be an exciting night!
