March 24, 2010  

She's an Astronomer: Elizabeth Siegel

elizabeth photo

Elizabeth Siegel lives in California in the USA. She is 57 years old and has worked as a registered nurse for the last 9 years after going back to college at 42 to do a nursing degree. She has two grown up kids – a son in college and a daughter who works in the aerospace industry.

  • How did you first hear about Galaxy Zoo?

I found out about Galaxy Zoo  through the science news page at Yahoo two years ago as the project was beginning.  It was only on the page for one day, but I remembered the name and was able to find it on my own.

  • What has been your main involvement in the Galaxy Zoo project?

My main involvement has been classifying galaxies.  Specifically: Galaxy Zoo 1 and 2, mergers, barred spirals, AGN-clouds, and Irregular spirals.  I have found a few asteroids and some possible gravitational lensens I did and OOTD on polar rings. I am an active member on the galaxy zoo forum, and have posted pictures in the pure art thread, not to mention one or two galaxies..  I’ve recently started working on the Solar Storm Watch, Supernova Zoo, and the Moon Zoo Beta test.  Between these projects I have contributed around 200,000 classifications and spent almost 4000 hours on Galaxy Zoo.

  • What do you like most about being involved in Galaxy Zoo?

I love looking at the galaxies, learning about them and discussing them with fellow zooites from around the world online or in person through group meets like the one we had in September 2008 at Chabot Observatory in Oakland California (West Coast Meet Ups Forum Thread).

  • What do you think is the most interesting astronomical question Galaxy Zoo will help to solve?

I am not a Astronomer so I really cannot answer that question. I do known as volunteers we are providing  the Astronomers loads of information which would have taken them a long time to research otherwise. Of course there is Hanny’s Voorwerp that the scientist and zooites would like to learn more about. Personally it’s all the galaxies I like. I find Polar Ring galaxies to be the most interesting to me since there are so few of these type galaxies. If Astronomers could learn more about these galaxies that would indeed be cool.

  • How/when did you first get interested in Astronomy?

When I was around 14 years old I had read a lot of books on the moon and meteorites and wanted to be an astronomer.  That year my Christmas present was a telescope. One night, my friends and I decided that we were going to ride our bikes to Lick Observatory.  We snuck out at one in the morning rode twenty miles East of San Jose California.  We made it by mid-morning but of course everything was closed.  There was an old man and he asked us what we were doing.  We told him we had come to see the observatory.  He smiled and said the best time to see the observatory was at night.  He gave us some water to drink, and we smiled and  thanked him for the water and information.  But 20 miles up hill on bikes is a long way to go to be told to come back at night. The old man did not even show us around.  When I found out that most of Astronomy had to do with math I lost interest in being a Astronomer  as a profession since math was never my strong subject. Over the years I kept up on Astronomy though reading science articles watching programs like Nova etc. Then I found Galaxy zoo I can look at all the galaxies, stars, nebulae,  clusters which is my favorite part of Astronomy

  • What (if any) do you think are the main barriers to women’s involvement in Astronomy?

I have no idea.

  • Do you have any particular role models in Astronomy?

I do not have any particular role models in Astronomy but I do admire the way the Galaxy zoo team has taken the original Galaxy zoo project and is now expanding it to the Zooniverse. I would like to invite everyone to come and participate in these wonderful zoo projects.

This post is part of the ongoing She’s an Astronomer series on the Galaxy Zoo Blog is support of the IYA2009 cornerstone project of the same name (She’s an Astronomer). We are listed on the She’s an Astronomer website in their Profiles.

We’re almost done – this is the penultimate entry, and last Zooite we will be interviewing. Just one more researcher to go.

March 18, 2010  

Who's looking at the Voorwerp?

I just got a notification from the XMM-Newton Science Operations Centre that our observations of IC 2497 and the Voorwerp have now been scheduled for April 19th. XMM-Newton is esa’s flagship X-ray satellite and can observe photons from 0.2-10 keV. We’ve already got our hard X-ray observations from Suzaku last year, so XMM will have a second, detailed look at the softer X-rays. Also, if there’s anything there, then XMM will give us a very rough image; Suzaku can’t take images, only spectra. After the data are taken, it may take a few weeks for esa to process the raw data before they send it to us. Stay tuned…

March 14, 2010  

Ring of the Week: The Eagle Has Landed

“Fly me to the moon

Let me play among the stars

Let me see what spring is like

On a-Jupiter and Mars”

– Frank Sinatra, “Fly Me to the Moon”

This week I had the honour of meeting three legends of the 20th century; astronauts Capt. Neil Armstrong, Capt. Gene Cernan and Capt. Jim Lovell. Neil Armstrong is, of course, the first man to set foot on the moon (Apollo 11), Jim Lovell was the commander of Apollo 13 and Gene Cernan was the last man to walk on the moon (Apollo 17).

astronauts

Right to left: Capt. Gene Cernan, Capt. Neil Armstrong and Capt. Jim Lovell

The astronauts were talking on behalf of the Foundation for Science and Technology at the Royal Society and Cernan and Lovell both spoke of their disappointment at the US plans to abandon the “Constellation” programme which aimed to put astronauts back on the moon by 2020. Cernan said that, walking on the moon in 1972, he never would have imagined that he would still be the last man to set foot on the moon’s suface over 37 years later. The astronauts also talked of their hope that they would be alive to see man set foot on Mars.

Politics aside, it was fascinating to hear the astronauts speak about their experiences. All of the astronauts agreed that travelling to the moon changed their perspective of life on Earth. Cernan said it was staring out of the window into the black “infinity of space”, whereas Lovell said it was looking back from the moon and “being able to cover the entire World with my thumb” that was the most life changing moment.

eaglelandedMy Ring of the Week this week is Galaxy Zoo image 587741708326863123 and is in honour of Neil Armstrong and his lunar module, the Eagle. You can see the ring on the bottom right of the image and an unusual, bird-shaped “Eagle” galaxy on the top left. The “Eagle” galaxy is at the same redshift as the ring and so at the same distance away from us. This means that the two galaxies are most likely interacting in some way.

It could be that the “Eagle” is a polar ring (see last week’s post), where stars have been gravitationally stripped from the larger ring galaxy to rotate around the poles of the smaller galaxy. Or perhaps this is a collisional ring system, the “Eagle” having crashed through the centre of the larger galaxy to create the blue ring of stars that we see on the bottom right of the image. At the moment I’m not quite sure exactly which option (if either!) is the right one so feel free to post your own ideas about what you think may be happening and I’ll let you know if I figure it out!

March 12, 2010  

Galaxy Zoo auf Deutsch!

Galaxy Zoo goes international. Nachdem unsere Webseiten schon seit einiger Zeit auf Polnisch zur Verfuegung stehen, haben wir jetzt endlich die langerwartete deutsche Version online. Saemtliche Links zur Zoo-Story, zur Zoo-Wissenschaft, und natuerlich zum Klassifizieren sind jetzt auch in deutscher Sprache vorhanden. Falls ihr euch nicht sicher wart, ob ihr die Kategorien alle richtig verstanden habt – klassifiziert die hundert tausend Galaxien doch einfach nochmal :-)! Und was viel wichtiger ist: jetzt koennen endlich eure Freunde und Verwandten mitmachen, die des Englischen weniger maechtig sind.

Ist die Galaxie strukturlos und rund, ohne Anzeichen einer Scheibe? Hat die Galaxie einen Bauch in ihrer Mitte? Wie rund ist die Galaxie? Gibt es Anzeichen fuer einen Balken der durch die Mitte laeuft? Gibt es Anzeichen fuer Spiralarme? Und viele Fragen mehr zu Galaxien, die euch sicher bekannt vorkommen – alles jetzt auf Deutsch. Also – viel Spass beim “clicken”!

March 7, 2010  

Ring of the Week: Arp 87

“Up on a hill, as the day dissolves
With my pencil turning moments into line
High above in the violet sky
A silent silver plane – it draws a golden chain

One by one, all the stars appear
As the great winds of the planet spiral in
Spinning away, like the night sky at Arles
In the million insect storm, the constellations form

On a hill, under a raven sky
I have no idea exactly what I’ve drawn
Some kind of change, some kind of spinning away
With every single line moving further out in time”
– Brian Eno, “Spinning Away”

Well if you ask me, what you’ve drawn there Brian is a “Polar Ring” galaxy.

Polar ring galaxies, unlike all other galaxies in the Universe, are made up of two distinct parts. In the centre we have a normal galaxy and around the outside we have a “golden chain” of stars and gas clouds. This ring is perpendicular to the “silver plane” of the host galaxy disk, rotating over the poles, and so it’s known as a polar ring.

So how are polar rings formed? Polar rings are thought to form when two galaxies gravitationally interact with each other. We believe that “one by one, all the stars appear” as they are stripped from a passing galaxy and “spiral in” to produce the polar ring we see today. Polar rings, although not quite as rare as smoke rings, are pretty hard to find. According to “New observations and a photographic atlas of polar-ring galaxies”, about 1 in every 200 lenticular galaxies (a type of galaxy between an elliptical and a spiral) have these “golden chains” of stars and gas spinning around them. Below is a selection of some of my favourite polar rings from the Galaxy Zoo:

polarringsThe Zooites have done fantastically well at finding Polar Rings and you can see all of their incredible finds on the Possible Polar Ring thread on the Galaxy Zoo forum.

My Ring of the Week this week is the stunning pair of interacting galaxies Arp 87. Located in the constellation Leo, approximately 300 million light years away from Earth, Arp 87 gives us a fantastic insight in to exactly how polar ring galaxies are formed. The image on the left is the Galaxy Zoo Arp 87 image and on the right is an image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. We can clearly see the galaxy on the left gravitationally stripping away the stars and gas from the spiral galaxy on the right.

arp87image

Unfortunately for Brian Eno, his hypothesis of a “golden chain” of stars that “spiral in” a “silver plane” came a full 23 years after the first polar ring galaxy was identified by J. L. Sérsic in 1967.

However, perhaps someone else had already had a genuine polar ring premonition a full 78 years before Sérsic’s discovery…?

vangogh

– “Starry Night” 1889, Vincent Van Gogh

The Hubble image is part of a collection of 59 images of merging galaxies released on the occasion of its 18th anniversary on April 24, 2008. (NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration, and A. Evans (University of Virginia, Charlottesville/NRAO/Stony Brook University))

March 5, 2010  

Hubble observations – any week now!

Speaking of the long-awaited Hubble observations of Hanny’s Voorwerp – where are they? We know certain windows when each can be done, and is supposed to be carried out. One such week-long window has already gone by without getting data, so things are narrowed down a bit. Read More…

March 4, 2010  

UV(oorwerp) from Space

We have some new results to show off, Hanny’s Voorwerp observed using a space telescope. No, not that space telescope, that’s still coming up (shortly, we hope).

Soon after the initial results showed what a fascinating object Hanny’s
Voorwerp was proving to be, it was entered in the observing schedule for NASA’S GALEX satellite (GALaxy Evolution EXplorer). Alex Szalay, who belongs to both the GALEX and Galaxy Zoo science teams, played a key role in making this happen). Alex has interesting career parallels with Brian May, but that’s another story.

GALEX was designed to make the first sensitive ultraviolet survey of most of the whole sky (skipping only areas where there are such bright stars that they would damage the detector array), with a major goal of tracing the recent evolution of galaxies. Read More…

March 3, 2010  

Zoo 2 Bars Paper Available Now

There’s been a lot of interest in the Galaxy Zoo 2 bars paper since I posted about its submission last month. So this is just a quick note to say we decided to make it available on astroph where you can read about the results in full.

March 1, 2010  

She's an Astronomer: Manda Banerji

manda_croppedDr. Manda Banerji is a postdoctoral researcher within the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge where she works on distant galaxies in the Universe. Originally from India, Manda moved to the UK almost 10 years ago to complete her A-levels and never dreamed at that point that she would fall in love with the UK so much that she’d still be here today! She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Cambridge in 2005 and her PhD at University College London in 2009. In between Manda also spent a year working as a research scientist at the National Physical Laboratory.

When not doing research, Manda loves traveling the world and enjoys good food, good wine and the company of good friends. If she ever finds more hours in the day (or less of a need to sleep), she hopes to take up dancing again and start working on her first novel!

  • How did you first hear about Galaxy Zoo?

I saw the Galaxy Zoo papers on astro-ph of course when they were first coming out. However, I only decided to get involved later when my PhD supervisor, Prof. Ofer Lahav mentioned it to me while I was at UCL. We were working together on using machine learning algorithms such as artificial neural networks to estimate the redshifts of galaxies from their colours. Ofer mentioned that he had used the same neural network tool to classify galaxies with collaborators in the early nineties. He also knew Chris Lintott from having been his PhD co-supervisor at UCL so we decided to start working together on applying machine learning to the Galaxy Zoo data.

  • What has been your main involvement in the Galaxy Zoo project?

I led the machine learning paper which showed that the Galaxy Zoo classifications can be used as a “training set” in order to supervise the learning of automated morphological classifiers such as artificial neural networks. Once these networks have been “trained” using the human classifications, they can be used to automatically classify much larger data sets.

  • What do you like most about being involved in Galaxy Zoo?

The best thing about being involved in Galaxy Zoo is the mass appeal of any work carried out on the project. I have always believed in the importance of communicating science not just to fellow researchers but also general members of the public so that they hopefully find it interesting and feel inspired to pursue some aspect of it themselves. The Galaxy Zoo project provides a wonderful forum through which to communicate interesting science to many many members of the public while at the same time getting them involved to contribute to the projects themselves.

  • What do you think is the most interesting astronomical question Galaxy Zoo will help to solve?

I think one very unique aspect of Galaxy Zoo is the sheer size of the data set that has now been classified by eye. This means we can actually make a lot of statistically significant statements about the nature of our Universe. For example, what fraction of elliptical galaxies don’t live in overdense regions of the Universe? What fraction of them are blue? In addition, the discovery of unusual classes of objects such as the Green Peas will pose as yet undefined questions. This to me is the most fun part of doing science. You often don’t know what the best questions are to ask before you’ve stumbled upon an answer!

  • How/when did you first get interested in Astronomy?

I first became interested in astronomy when I was about ten years old. I still remember the day actually. We were visiting the Kennedy Space Center in Orlando on a family holiday in Florida. I was so inspired and fascinated by everything I saw and just contemplating the vastness of space and the many things we didn’t know about it, I couldn’t imagine not wanting to find out more. Ever since that day I have wanted to be an astrophysicist. I should also mention that were it not for my brilliant physics teacher at sixth form college, I probably would never had the confidence to pursue an academic career. He would spend most of his lessons making us read New Scientist and watching Horizon and I think this is when I developed an appetite for scientific research and began to appreciate the creativity and independence it affords.

  • What (if any) do you think are the main barriers to women’s involvement in Astronomy?

I think there probably were many barriers to women in astronomy ten maybe twenty years ago. However, I do feel that today this is much less of an issue. For example, I don’t think astronomy is any longer a male dominated subject and the situation here is much better than in other areas of physics. That is not to say that there aren’t many barriers to pursuing an academic career. For example the need to move around frequently for postdoc positions often means people have to make very tough choices. However, in my experience there are many men who worry about this too and many women who don’t so I don’t think this is a barrier that is specific to women by any means!

Having said that, one problem that I do think faces women in astronomy today is the lack of female role models. There are very few female astronomers in very senior academic positions and even fewer who have chosen to have a family. This does sometimes make me doubt if I can pull off both having a successful academic career as well as a family because there are so few examples of women who have actually achieved this! I hope this will change though in years to come.

  • Do you have any particular role models in Astronomy?

I think there are so many people in astronomy (both men and women) who are inspiring in different ways that it’s very hard to single out just a few of them. I’ve learned different things from all the different people that I have interacted with so far in my research career and they’ve all been valuable lessons to learn!

This post is part of the ongoing She’s an Astronomer series on the Galaxy Zoo Blog is support of the IYA2009 cornerstone project of the same name (She’s an Astronomer). We are listed on the She’s an Astronomer website in their Profiles.

We’re almost done – just one more Zooite and one more researcher to come in the series!

February 28, 2010  

Ring of the Week: Arp 147

“Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time…

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.”
– Bob Dylan, “Mr Tambourine Man”

After last week’s leisurely cruise through 450 million light years to Mayall’s Object, this week I take you on a flying tour across the local Universe to view the spectacular galactic jewels known as “Smoke Rings”.

Smoke Rings, like all collisional ring galaxies, are formed when a smaller galaxy hits bull’s-eye into the centre of a larger disk galaxy. The impact creates a density wave, throwing matter out into a ring shape. With the help of the Zooites I’ve found just 12 Smoke Rings in the Galaxy Zoo and so these amazing objects are very rare indeed. You can see 4 of them below:

Smoke Rings

There are two things you’ll notice about these galaxies:

Firstly, all of the smoke rings we’ve found are blue in colour. This is because as the shock wave expands into the disk, it triggers the birth of large numbers of high mass stars. Massive, young stars are extremely hot and so the light that they radiate is bright blue.

Secondly smoke rings, by definition, have no central nucleus. Answering the question of why smoke rings have no obvious nucleus is not as simple as it may sound but we believe that smoke rings are created in one of the following situations:

  1. The original target galaxy had no substantial nucleus to start with
  2. Or the angle and position of impact was such that the nucleus was thrown out into the ring
  3. Or the nucleus was destroyed by the impact

Smoke rings are incredibly important as they are shining blue clues as to how galaxies collide. My Ring of the Week this week is Arp 147 – a perfect example of the way that smoke rings allow us to turn back the clock and stare deep into the Universe’s distant past.

Arp 147 is located in the constellation Cetus over 400 million light years from Earth. The image on the left is the Galaxy Zoo Arp 147 image and on the right is an image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. We can clearly see the “bullet” galaxy on the left and, on the right, the bright blue ruins of the original “target” galaxy. What makes Arp 147 so special is the unusual reddish-brown spot at the bottom of the ring and we believe that this marks the exact position of the original nucleus of the “target” galaxy. From the positions of the bullet, the smoke ring and the red spot we can rewind time over millions of years and simulate exactly how these two galaxies collided.

arp147

So as we “dance beneath the diamond sky” it is the smoke rings, beautiful in their simplicity, that make the “foggy ruins of time” crystal clear.

 

The Hubble image is part of a collection of 59 images of merging galaxies released on the occasion of its 18th anniversary on April 24, 2008. (NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration, and A. Evans (University of Virginia, Charlottesville/NRAO/Stony Brook University))

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