Zooing all over the world
I last updated the Galaxy Zoo city league table back in April. How do things look now? In good old fashioned reverse order :
10 Down from 2nd last time, Manchester. Having e-MERLIN to play with is obviously distracting our good friends at Jodrell.
9 A new entry – Los Angeles. Presumably Hollywood doesn’t have enough stars of its own.
8 Berlin The first non-native English speaking city to make the list. Will it be the highest?
7 A suprise 5th last time, Bristol is down two spots this time.
6 The third new entry in a row is Melbourne, according to Wikipedia home to the world’s largest tram network.
5 Down two spots from 4th last time, New York is the highest ranked American city.
4 The team behind the Polish translation of Galaxy Zoo 2 have been working hard, and they’re rewarded by seeing Warsaw in 4th place. It’s not the highest new entry, though.
3 Rising four places, Sydney. Australians can’t stand the sight of a league table they’re not on the top of.
2 In second, this chart’s highest new entry – Eindhoven. A stunning performance from our Dutch classifiers.
1 But hanging onto first place in the Zoo classification stakes is London. Can anything topple the legions of office-bound zooites from the top of the tree?
She's an Astronomer: Aida Berges
Aida Berges (“lovethetropics“) lives in Puerto Rico with her husband and children. Originally from the Dominican Republic, she studied there in an all girl Catholic school (Colegio del Apostolado) where she was inspired by her her history teacher (Rosa Maria Reyes Feriz). After graduation she started a university degree in Law where Supreme Court Judge Ana Rosa Berges Dreyfuss (a family member) became a beloved teacher. After finishing her degree in English at a different university, she worked various secretarial jobs and as a translator. She moved to Puerto Rico to live with her eldest brother and his wife, and there met husband (Benito Garcia Mendez). Her main job for the last almost 30 years has been as a dedicated wife and mother to children Benny and Laura (now grown; Benny works in retail and Laura is finishing her Masters’s degree in Psychology). The family spent most of this time in Puerto Rico, except for a 7 year spell in New Jersey where the children were born. Aida loves to read history, science fiction and fantasy. She has 3 dogs and one cat. And she loves the ocean, especially going to the beach or just watching the waves.
- How did you first hear about Galaxy Zoo?
I was reading CNN online and found an article describing how a very young teacher from the Netherlands had found a new kind of object and it was called Hanny’s Voorwerp. It was an article to celebrate the first year of Galaxy Zoo. I went to Galaxy Zoo immediately and my life changed forever…It was like coming home for me.
- What has been your main involvement in the Galaxy Zoo project?
I am part of the Irregulars Project and also the Hyper-Velocity Stars Project (and check out their blog). In the Irregulars Project I look for irregulars galaxies and send them to Richard Proctor to be integrated into the hunt. We now have more than 17,000 irregulars and the numbers keep growing every day. And we still need the help of the Zooites with their clicks on the Irregular Hunt (check out the Irregulars Project forum discussion). I send Richard between 100 and 500 possible irregulars every week. I also worked on the three Pea hunts, the Mergers hunt, the Voorwerpjes hunt and the Supernova hunt. And I found an unusual green object ages ago which has been dubbed Aida’s disturbed green mystery object and has been an object of the day (OOTD). We still don’t know what it is.
Both major projects I’m involved have been pure coincidence or serendipity. With the Irregulars Project I was the one getting the galaxies for the hunt and when we decided to write the first paper about astronomy without being astronomers I was included. I classified by myself 24,000 galaxies to clean the sample from spirals, elliptical galaxies, artifacts and unidentifiable blobs. Then classified 12,000 more!
For the HVSs project it was pure coincidence that I found two in about five minutes. I had to Google the term Hyper-velocity Stars because I had no idea they existed. Posted it on the newbies thread and I had to post an “Object of the Day” (OOTD on High Velocity Stars) and Thomas Jennings gave me the idea to post the known HVSs. Zookeeper Jordan read the OOTD and got so excited a group of fearless zooites decided to look for more, I am one of them…we are almost ready to post the first entry on a new thread for them on Galaxy Zoo. So far there are only 16 or 17 known HVSs. But we are still very optimist we can find more of them even if it is for sheer numbers. (We zooites are bigger than the Swiss Army.)
- What do you like most about being involved in Galaxy Zoo?
- What do you think is the most interesting astronomical question Galaxy Zoo will help to solve?
- How/when did you first get interested in Astronomy?
- What (if any) do you think are the main barriers to women’s involvement in Astronomy?
- Do you have any particular role models in Astronomy?
I would have to say that the Zookeepers are my role models because before getting involved on Galaxy Zoo I didn’t know any astronomers. Chris Lintott and Jordan Raddick specially because we are doing the Irregulars Project together. And Jordan Raddick is double because he is helping us with the HVSs. And Bill Keel (NGC3314), I am helping him get more possible Voorwepjes. Thomas Jennings started the Newbies thread and has gone back to college to study Astronomy. That’s what I call commitment. The person who inspired me to love science in general was my sister Adolfina. She is a medical doctor with specialties in Pediatrics and Hematology. She and her husband, who is also a hematologist discovered an element in the blood unknown until they found it. She is also the best and most loving sister anyone can have.
I would also like to include thanks to my parents Rafael Bergés Lara and Thelma García de Bergés, and my Uncle Manuel Bergés Lara and Aunt Carmen
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. This is the 7th post of the series. So far we have interviewed
- Hanny Van Arkel (Galaxy Zoo volunteer and finder of Hanny’s Voorwerp).
- Dr. Vardha Nicola Bennert (researcher at UCSB involved in Hanny’s Voorwerp followup and the “peas” project).
- Alice Sheppard (Galaxy Zoo volunteer and forum moderator).
- Carie Cardamone (graduate student at Yale who lead the Peas paper).
- Gemma Couglin (“fluffyporcupine”, Galaxy Zoo volunteer and forum moderator).
- Dr. Kate Land (original Galaxy Zoo team member and first-author of the first Galaxy Zoo scientific publication; now working in the financial world).
Still to come in the series – more Galaxy Zoo volunteers and researchers. We’re not done yet!
Merger Papers Accepted for Publication in MNRAS
Thanks for everyone’s work – both papers should soon be appearing in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 🙂
Galaxy Zoo motivation study paper accepted!
Our paper on the motivations of Galaxy Zoo users has been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy Education Review! Now that the paper has been accepted, I have posted it on the arXiv system. Head on over and read it if you’re interested in hearing more about the interviews we did with some of you to learn what makes Galaxy Zoo appeal to you. I wrote a summary of the paper for this blog a while back, but now you can read the paper itself.
The paper should appear in the Galaxy Zoo Library in the forum soon, and Pamela, Georgia, or I would be glad to answer any questions you have about the paper there. The next step in this research is to analyze the data from the survey that many of you took, and we’re working on that step now. Updates on that will come soon. Thanks to my lovely co-authors, and of course to all of you, without whom this none of this research would be possible!
She's an Astronomer: Kate Land
Dr. Kate Land is from sunny Sussex on the south coast of the UK and her research/studies have taken her to Cambridge (undergrad), Imperial (PhD), and then Oxford (postdoc). Her PhD was on the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation, and in particular exploring anomalies in the WMAP data and their implications for our cosmological models. During her postdoc, her research continued to focus on cosmological observations, such as galaxy surveys and supernovae data, and what they might tell us beyond our current understanding. While a postdoc in the Astrophysics group of Oxford University, Kate had the pleasure of sharing an office with Dr. Chris Lintott. But she assures him that this had nothing to do with her decision to leave the field and enter into a new profession! Kate now works as a quantitative researcher in finance, and enjoys living in London with her boyfriend and savoring the delights of North London pubs at the weekends.
- How did you first hear about Galaxy Zoo?
In the pub with Chris! Another cosmologist (Anze Slosar) and myself were interested in investigating recent claims in the literature about the rotations of spiral galaxies in our local universe aligning in an unlikely way (they shouldn’t really align at all!). But we realised that we’d have to go through thousands of images of galaxies (or develop some software) to identify the handedness of the galaxies. We thought about dumping a laptop in the coffee area of our department to get people to help, and I asked Chris for advice over a pint one evening – because I knew he was very good at crowd-sourcing (having already got children from around the world to observe a quasar for him 24 hours a day!). He then told me about Galaxy Zoo, which was in its infant stage at this point. And it was a great match – our project would fit in perfectly, adding another scientific motivation to GZ while Anze and I would provide some more ‘man’ power!
- What has been your main involvement in the Galaxy Zoo project?
I was pretty heavily involved in all stages of the project for its fist year from helping to test the site, monitor traffic, analyse data, interact with zooites, deal with the press, and eventually publish papers! I was part of the front line when it all kicked off in July 07 – and I mean front line! It was madness with thousands of emails a day coming in, media people ringing for interviews, and servers exploding! I loved answering peoples questions but we quickly realised that we couldn’t keep up with the emails and we launched first the FAQ page on the site, and then the forum. The media part was fun too… doing live radio interviews on the fly, and helping with pieces for New Scientist, Physics World, etc. About 9 months after Galaxy Zoo launched we submitted the first Galaxy Zoo paper. It was an awesome moment for me, and the whole project, when it got published.
- What did you like most about being involved in Galaxy Zoo?
The popularity of the site was absolutely heart-warming. I used to get quite emotional reading emails and posts on the forum from zooites who loved the project and were wild about astronomy. So much of an academic’s work can be remote, abstract, and cut off from the ‘real-world’. And it was just brilliant to work on something that touched so many people.
- What do you think is the most interesting astronomical question Galaxy Zoo will help to solve?
The cosmology ones! But I am biased… to be totally honest I didn’t know much about galaxies when I first got involved with GZ. I was, and remain, more interested in cosmology; the study of Universe as a whole. And as objects sitting in space, galaxies can reveal a lot about how the Universe is expanding, and any invisible forces that are influencing them.
- How/when did you first get interested in Astronomy?
As a kid I was always fascinated by big questions, like ‘where is the edge of the Universe?’, and ‘what is empty space made of?’. I couldn’t sleep sometimes for getting myself so confused and freaked out! My granddad was also a massive influence on me – he was a mathematician, and fascinated by astronomy. At 7 he bought me a calculator, at 8 a star chart, and at 9 a subscription to the Junior Astronomical Society. I also got handed down a telescope about this time and saw some of Jupiter’s moons and Saturn’s rings from my bedroom window. Very cool! Maths became my thing at school, college, and Uni. But in my second year at Uni I got back into astronomy – heavily influenced by images from the Hubble telescope which are gorgeous and awe inspiring. I found the scales, temperatures, and physics involved with the stuff going on in the Universe very exciting – and I was chuffed to be able to do the final year of my degree in Astrophysics (rather than Maths). This was the first step towards me becoming a theoretical cosmologist, and thinking about those big questions again!
- What (if any) do you think are the main barriers to women’s involvement in Astronomy?
I don’t know of anything stopping women getting involved in amateur astronomy. But I don’t think the academic career path suits women particularly well. I was always given enormous encouragement from my peers and never felt discriminated against. But I personally wasn’t keen on the post-doc circuit of moving about every few years… I wanted to plan for the future and ‘nest build’ somewhat, and in a location of my choice! I think this is more of a female thing – to agonise over the future. But it might have just been me being unadventurous!
- Do you have any particular role models in Astronomy?
My supervisor, Prof. Joao Magueijo, was an enormous influence on me. Not only a genius, but a lot of fun to work with – very supportive, unpatronising, and encouraging with his students and very involved in the research we did together. Another inspiration is Dr. Sarah Bridle, of UCL. A very smart woman, who is refreshingly unpretentious and friendly! I’d say she is a great role model for female academics.
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 now listed on the She’s an Astronomer website in their Profiles. This is the sixth post of the series. So far we have interviewed:
- Hanny Van Arkel (Galaxy Zoo volunteer and finder of Hanny’s Voorwerp, “Hanny”).
- Dr. Vardha Nicola Bennert (researcher at UCSB involved in Hanny’s Voorwerp followup and the “peas” project).
- Alice Sheppard (Galaxy Zoo volunteer and forum moderator, “Alice”).
- Carie Cardamone (graduate student at Yale who lead the Peas paper).
- Gemma Coughlin (Galaxy Zoo volunteer and forum moderator, “Fluffyporcupine”).
Still to come in the series – more Galaxy Zoo volunteers and researchers, including next: Aida Berges (“Lovethetropics”), high velocity star searcher extraordinaire!
Voorwerping, Part 1
I’m working on the Suzaku data that we’ve obtained on IC2497, the galaxy next to Hanny’s Voorwerp. X-rays, especially the really energetic ones that Suzaku is able to detect are probably the best way to probe whether the black hole in a galaxy is actively feeding or not. Shanil Virani and I are currently working on the data reduction and analysis, which is quite challenging. Early indications are that the data will show us some really exciting things, but the problem is that they make us really scratch our heads. It may yet take us quite a while to see if we understand what’s going on and we may have to pick the brains of a theorist or two. So, stay tuned….
The Hyper-Velocity Stars Project: Serendipity at its Best
Hello everyone and thank you for reading this blog post. You will read how a group of people, non-professional astronomers, from around the world got together to seek a common goal.
My name is Aida Bergés and my Galaxy Zoo name is Lovethetropics. I’m Dominican by birth but live in Puerto Rico, and I hunt Irregular Galaxies, asteroids, Voorwerpjes and now Hyper-Velocity Stars.
The Hyper-Velocity Star Project was due to one of those many accidental discoveries that happen at Galaxy Zoo. I was looking for irregular galaxies for Waveney’s Irregular Project. I saw an intensely blue star and checked it out to see if it was a white dwarf (it amuses me to no end that white dwarfs are all blue). It wasn’t. SIMBAD said it was a Hyper-velocity star. I kept looking for more irregulars, five minutes later saw another very blue star and checked it too – expecting it to be a white dwarf; but it was another HVS. At that point I looked the name up because I had never heard of that type of star. It is a star moving at a vast speed relative to the rest of the galaxy. Possible explanations for this are being flung away from a black hole; being part of a galaxy merger; a binary system being disrupted either by a black hole, the proximity of another star, or one of the pair going supernova . . . and so on. They can travel at about 4000 kilometres per second, and seem to be heading out of our galaxy! All the ones discovered are massive and blue.
I posted the two stars and a brief explanation on the newbies thread. The newbies thread was started by Thomas Jennings, Thomas J or “Tommy” on the forum, on my “zoobirthday” – the day I came to the Galaxy Zoo Forum. A week or two later, Alice Sheppard, Galaxy Zoo moderator and close friend, asked me to post an Object of the Day. I said yes but had no idea what to write. Thomas J reminded me of the hyper-velocity stars I had posted on his thread.
Tommy and I started to look for papers about hyper-velocity stars and he found a powerpoint presentation made by one of the Zookeepers, Jordan Raddick. At the time Jordan created it (2003), there were only three confirmed hyper-velocity stars. All of this dialog was written on the Object of the Day thread, which meant we started to get the attention of and much help help from other zooites. Mark Redgwell – BlackProjects on the Zoo, from the UK – found more papers. When I wrote the Object of the Day we had found 10 hyper-velocity stars, but they didn’t have an SDSS number and I had no idea on how to get them. Tommy again came to the rescue and found their SDSS ObjIDs, and I posted these onto Object of the Day.
It was a hit! We started getting help and more papers, especially from Stellar, 14, child genius from the UK who should be in college already. We found out there were 16 confirmed hyper-velocity stars, most of which had been found by Dr. Warren Brown from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and Harvard University. He is the outmost authority on HVSs, and you’ll be hearing more about him in a minute . . .
The question came up on the Object of the Day: How can we find more of these mysterious stars? Many Zooites joined the discussion, especially Mukund Vedapudi from India, Jules Wilkinson from the UK, and Dave, Curtis Garrett and Gargleblaster, all from the USA.
We decided we needed our own place to talk, for one thing because we were burying newer Objects of the Day, and for another this was the time of the forum merger which caused a few technical problems. Waveney (Richard Proctor, UK), our “fairy godfather”, offered his test forum, where a handful of zooites play. It’s more private than this one, but nevertheless we kept getting links to papers and articles from Jamartins from Portugal. By now nine or so of us had decided we were a team.
I have an interview for our “She’s an Astronomer” blog project on October 1st, and as it loomed closer and closer I wanted us to have a first post back on the Galaxy Zoo Forum so as to have a link from my interview, and to invite all zooites to join us. Stellar and I worked for 16 hours with some help from Alice and Half65 from IT – both of whom became part of the team, too – we posted our own thread, started a blog and a twitter account, and got ourselves a gmail account so we could spread the word that we are looking for Hyper-Velocity Stars and help from anyone who would like to work with us or advise us.
Jules, Dave, and Mukund Vedapudi have between them found 40 possible hyper-velocity stars, about half of which have a known radial velocity, and which you can examine here. Our new thread has grown to six pages due to the interest of our fellow Zooites; and yesterday I received a lovely personal message from Oswgeo9050 presenting another possible candidate, just from examining the spectra! She’s just joined us, too.
Help is flooding in, some from astronomically unexpected quarters. Karen Masters , who works at Portsmouth University, runs the “She’s an Astronomer and Galaxy Zoo” project, and has been part of Galaxy Zoo’s work on dust in galaxies, red spirals, and outreach generally, just happens to be a former colleague of the very Warren Brown mentioned earlier! It is due to her kindness that we have just got in touch with him – he has heard about our work from Karen and has graciously sent us pointers on how to find more Hyper-Velocity Stars. It looks like it’s going to be tricky: there is only one of these for every 100 million “normal” stars, and there is in any case an error range of 220 kilometres per second (plus or minus) due to our own Solar System’s rotation round our spiral galaxy!
Just to add to this, on Wednesday 9th September, we heard from ZookeeperKevin that he was about to meet Warren Brown and hoped to set up a collaboration. We had a few hours to decide exactly what sort of help from the experts we wanted, and to send him our first e-mail! This was no easy task, not knowing the ins and outs of academic life. We waited on tenterhooks, our hearts pounding . . .
On Thursday evening Kevin got back to Alice. He and Warren Brown had taken a look at some of the candidates. He believed that none of them were hyper-velocity stars for many reasons, one being that the SDSS people have already combed the data. But, apparently, “one object looks interesting”. We don’t yet know what that is, and just have to wait for him to – and this is the good new – join the forum and talk to us more, which apparently he will be doing!
What will happen next? There are probably more stones to unturn. Even if we fail, we still set up an exciting project and discovered many things – as amateurs who decided to work together. In the meantime, please join us to put forward any questions, suggestions, and ideas.
Very special thanks to Zookeepers Jordan, Karen and Kevin for taking such an interest in our work and kindly providing so much information and hope. We also thank Geza Gyuk from Adler planetarium http://www.adlerplanetarium.org for his enthusiastic help.And thanks to our fellow zooites for being serendipities with all of us!
The Galaxy Zoo Library
Dear Zooites,
I’d like to throw open the doors and welcome you to a relatively new area of the forum: the Galaxy Zoo Library.
We’ve been constructing this for a while. The original idea was EigenState’s. He did a great deal of splendid work planing and putting up the first gleaming shelves. Sadly, he’s left now; so Waveney, Hanny and I have put up some more library areas; Geoff has offered to help me run the Library for the time being; and I’d like to invite you all to come in and use them.
The Library has several purposes. First of all, it’s a place to store the Galaxy Zoo papers. EigenState gave each paper two threads of its own: one, a locked one with bare information; second, a discussion thread for each one. You can find links to each of these in his Master Index.
Waveney has put up a concise storyline about the process of each paper, including the abstracts, and all the Galaxy Zoo Blog links about each one. Not all of our papers have actually been accepted yet. Those which are accepted appear as a link to their arXiv page. This way, you can follow the lives of each paper: their writing, their results, their acceptance – and those papers that build upon each other; for science is often a series of many steps.
Do you find scientific papers rather hard to understand? I do. I read lots of them for university and after four years still couldn’t make head or tail of them. I nicknamed their language “journalese”. Scientific papers are written for a special audience; and some people – not necessarily just scientists – can extract masses of information out of them. I’d like to invite any Zooite to write summaries of what each paper means, or to “translate” various parts of papers – whatever parts you like! – into easier language. That’s not to denigrate this wonderful blog; I’ll be linking to relevant entries whenever possible, too. What I’d really like us to do together, and I know it sounds ambitious, is to see if we can, together, when we’re ready, get more fluent in journalese. Dozens of us have in redshift and spectra. Let’s see what happens!
From SDSS: a flying notebook in space!
EigenState also created a Reading List of useful books to read: some hefty, formal, and academic, others not. He invited people to contribute their useful reads, and there is also a Reading List discussion. The subjects of these books include galaxies, cosmology, physics, gravity, quantum theory, practical astronomy, popular science, humour, and more.
Hanny wrote a list of Galaxy Zoo items in the media, which she blogged about a few days ago. You can find this both in Latest News and in the Library.
And what about sharing books ourselves? Chatting about them, recommending them to each other – and reviewing our favourites (or even least favourites!). I’d like to invite any of you to write a review of any books you liked, disliked, found useful, or would generally like to show us. You can send it to me or to Geoff. The reviews will be kept in this locked thread – but as you’ll see in that link, we now also have plenty of comfy threads to be more informal in and drink our coffee.
I’m hoping that this Library will cater for all tastes: those who like quiet, carpeted, stained-glass-windowed libraries with hushed footsteps and deliciously difficult volumes; and those who like bean bags, paper aeroplanes and a nice pile of books and fun websites to pelt each other with and enjoy. On that subject, I can’t imagine anything sadder than an empty, unused paper aeroplane thread; so do please post your favourite scientific sillinesses in there. I have a special fondness for Eric Idle’s Galaxy Song.
Voorwerpje Hunting for Beginners
Three months ago I like the rest of you had never heard of a Voorwerpje. Laihro had been working with Bill Keel on the hunting for active galaxies with ionized gas clouds, and had worked out a way to extract active galaxies from SDSS, and had the idea of using my hunting program to search through the list. Two further lists of likely candidates also came from Kevin (from X-ray galaxies) and Bill (known active galaxies). This hunt needed a good tutorial, which Bill wrote, and then the hunt was launched. Voorwerpje hunting was looking for needles in haystacks, most images didn’t have a Voorwerpje, but it included some very pretty and interesting galaxies – enough to keep me in OOTD candidates for a year.
You all agreed on this one (otherwise known as NGC 5256 or Markarian 266).
Galaxy Zoo 