Happening soon here at the AAS meeting…

In a little over an hour, there will be a Galaxy Zoo press conference announcing to the community a new discovery that you have helped make. Many of you have heard about this one in the process of the research coming together, but it is an exciting result.

As always, Astronomy Cast LIVE will be broadcasting the press conference live from here in Pasadena. Here is the link to the live broadcast, which starts at 10:30 AM U.S. Pacific time:

Galaxy Zoo live press conference

During the conference, you will be able to chat, and someone will be on hand to answer any questions that you ask about the research.

After the press conference ends, we will save a recording of the broadcast and keep it available on the same site.

In case any of you have as much trouble as I do with converting time zones in your head (I have missed many a teleconference due to miscalculations), here is the time that it will appear in a major city hopefully near where you are (ordered east to west):

Sydney: 3:30 AM (0330)
Tokyo: 2:30 AM (0230)
Beijing: 1:30 AM (0130)
New Delhi: 11:00 PM (2300)
Moscow: 9:30 PM (2130)
Cape Town: 7:30 PM (1930)
Rome: 7:30 PM (1930)
London: 6:30 PM (1830)
New York: 1:30 PM (1330)
Chicago: 12:30 PM (1230)
Denver: 11:30 PM (1130)

Today’s guest blogger is Raul Jimenez who collaborated with us on an exciting paper on the spin (clockwise vs. counter-clockwise) of spiral galaxies.

The rate at which galaxies transform gas into stars as a function of time gives astronomers insight into the way galaxies formed and evolved. By using the SDSS spectra  one can infer the past star formation history of a galaxy. We have been doing this using sophisticated statistical tools, take a look here. Much has been learned about the formation of galaxies using their star formation history, for example we know that the most massive  galaxies assemble their stars early on, about 1-2 Gyr after the big-bang while small  mass galaxies (100 to 1000 times smaller than the milky way) do it during the whole age of the universe. What we have done in our recent paper is to look at how the star formation history of galaxies correlates to  the rotation direction of galaxies as measured by the galaxy zoo project. What we have found is that  galaxies that had lots of star formation in the past do tend to rotate in the same direction in groups with lengths of about 10 to 20 Mpc.

Although this might sound surprising, it is not! If one reviews very old papers, almost 40-50 years ago, where people like Andrei Doroskievich worked out the way galaxies should rotate based on how they were formed in the past, one realizes that the correlation we have found arises naturally in these models of galaxy formation, so-called hierarchical models. What is happening is that in the past the cluster of galaxies was not yet formed and the spiral galaxies that the galaxy zoo has been classifying by morphology were  coming down the filamentary structure into the proto-clusters. Because the proto-cluster already contains the big elliptical galaxies, they  provide the same  “pull” on all the spiral galaxies in the filament.  So it is quite exciting to see this result from the galaxy zoo and the MOPED/VESPA catalogs. Now it is time to go back to theory and  numerical simulations and understand better what it means for galaxy formation and evolution. This is something we will do next.

The paper has been submitted to MNRAS, and the pre-print is available for download on astro-ph.

Hi all,

Chris, Pamela, and I will be at the American Astronomical Society meeting next week. As always, I will be liveblogging Zoo-related events at the meeting, and hopefully uploading a photo or two. We’ll be coordinating our coverage with some other bloggers; I’ll post the link to that coverage here tomorrow. And if any of you are in the L.A. area, send me a message on the forum – I would love to meet you.

Hi All,

As you might recall, we were weathered out last January and so I’ve come back to 1) find my champagne bottle and 2) measure CO gas in merging spirals. The weather has been pretty good so far and in the first two nights we got 9 good detections. I would send pictures of what’s happening here but I forgot my camera cable, so all I can do is send an image of one of our detections. I’ll update you soon!

Good CO Detection

With the excitement about new observations of Hanny’s Voorwerp, this might be a good time to point out that Zoo participants are finding new examples of a related (albeit less spectacular) class of objects. (That was evidently my roundabout way of saying “hey, everyone, you can look for these too!”). What do these four galaxies have in common?

Read More…

So the long promised forums/Zoo accounts merge is underway but unfortunately things are moving a little slower than we’d like.  The good new is we’re making good progress, the bad news is the forums won’t be back up until tomorrow now – sorry!

More news in the morning…

Cheers

Arfon

Today is a big day for those of us who work behind the scenes at Galaxy Zoo.  More news later but for now the forums are in maintenance mode and new registrations are disabled on the Zoo until this evening.  More news later…

Cheers

Arfon

Our own paper covering the discovery of Hanny’s Voorwerp is still working it’s way through the refereeing process. We’ve come up against a referee who really understands the subject and it’s taking time to put right our numerous missteps and to make everything clear. A new version will be submitted in the next couple of days, so hopefully you’ll be able to read it soon.

In the meantime, a group of Dutch radio astronomers have published a paper reporting their own results which is accepted and available online. They were kind enough to discuss it with us, and add some of the team to the list of authors – and they’ll be blogging here next week to tell you about what they’ve done.

It still hurts to be beaten to publication, but at least they’re friendly and it’s another sign of how this remarkable object has captured people’s attention.

In our latest (behind-the-scenes) update of the Galaxy Zoo blog software, we’ve installed a plug in that makes it easy for you to share any story on the blog that you particularly like via portals such as digg.com and facebook. If you do like a post and want to spread the word about it, all you have to do is click on`Bookmark it’ to submit the story.

A while ago we asked you to fill out a short survey about your thoughts about Galaxy Zoo. The purpose of this survey was to get an idea of what was inspiring people to participate in Galaxy Zoo. Thank you for participating in that survey. We are starting to analyze the results of that survey, and we’re learning some interesting things. We’re waiting to share the results until we are finished with all the research, so that we don’t run the risk of biasing your answers because you have heard about the results. But don’t worry, we’ll describe all the results here on the blog, just as we are doing with all the Galaxy Zoo research results.

We’d like to ask you a few follow-up questions about why you participate in Galaxy Zoo. Please click on the link below to answer a short 4-question survey. Your responses will help us learn more about why so many people have found Galaxy Zoo engaging, and will help us design future projects to be even more appealing.

Please click on the link below and fill out the short survey. Thank you for your help!

Galaxy Zoo user follow-up survey

Clear skies,
Jordan