WHT second night prepped and ready to go!
One hour till sunset and Mark and I are ready for another fantastic night of supernovae observing. At the moment there is not a cloud in the sky, so let’s hope this good weather holds!
So far we have the Telescope set up and ready again, just waiting for darkness …
Sarah :0)
End of the night, and new supernovae confirmed
We’re nearing the end of the night now – and that cirrus that threatened earlier blew through quickly, leaving us with clear skies and generally excellent observing conditions.
We ploughed through 16 supernova candidates, which kept us on our toes, and a first look at the data shows that indeed many of them turned out to be supernovae as we had hoped, rather than other variables sources (such as variable stars). So excellent work!
Thanks to everyone who participated and helped to make a successful night of observation; we’ll try for a fuller report tomorrow on what we found. We also have one more night tomorrow night, when we’ll continue to look at candidates identified by the zoo, so keep checking in for updates!
Mark
WHT supernovae update
Just over half way through our first night now and we’re well on track. Mark and I are happy to report that we are currently taking data for our 9th object of the night. Thank goodness for clear skies!
Of the 8 objects we already have, we are confident that most of them are supernovae of one type or another. We will keep you posted on the exact number of correct identifications, as well as their type, when we have reduced our spectra.
Exciting stuff!
Sarah
WHT supernovae identified!
It’s still early in our run here at WHT and we have already identified two supernovae! One Type Ia and one Type II (wikipedia them here), which is an excellent start.
Looking at the status of the weather, we have mostly clear skies. There are a few thin clouds about, but in general the clouds are below us. So, we’re definitely hoping for a few more positive identifications tonight.
Sarah :0)
WHT prepare for action.
Quick update from Mark and I here at the William Herschel Telescope. It’s three hours till sundown and we are already setup, which means we are ready to go as soon as night falls. We are keeping our eyes on the clouds, you can see the satellite pictures here (click on the weather image and scroll down. La Palma is the north-westerly island of the cluster of 5) and hoping that they don’t cause too many problems.
Greatly looking forward to getting some good supernovae observing in. Look out for more updates through the night.
Good fortune supernovae hunters!
Sarah
Galaxy Zoo paper on host galaxies of growing black holes submitted!
It’s usually me who is reminding people to go blog about paper submissions and acceptances, so it’s a bit embarassing that I forgot to remind myself last week to announce the submission of the latest Galaxy Zoo paper.
I’ve been working on it for a while, probably over a year. The paper took so long to finish because not only did we have to analyse a huge amount of data, it also took quite a while to figure out what it all meant. I kept producing new plots that showed trends that didn’t really make any sense to us. We therefore needed to take our time digesting what we saw and condensing it into a `readable’ paper. It still over 20 pages long and there are still many results for which we could only offer some speculation. It’s not an easy paper to summarise, so I will (for now) simply summarise it as: “the black hole growth in spiral and elliptical galaxies is due to completely different evolutionary scenarios.”
Or, as I will put it in my talk on Friday at the IAU Symposium on the black hole-galaxy connection:
The answer may depend on
(thanks to stellar on the forum!)
Unlike our previous papers, this is the first paper that we have decided to submit to the Astrophysical Journal. Now fingers crossed that the refereeing process goes well.
Greenwich meeting on Sunday
I meant to post about this earlier, so apologies for those who only read the blog and not the forum. My only excuse is that we’ve been busy hunting for Supernovae…
On Sunday 16th August, a motley gathering of Zooites and Zookeepers will be descending on the Royal Observatory, Greenwich. There are more details in the forum, but the general plan is as follows :
13.45 : Recommended Planetarium Show – The Sky Tonight Live. An ROG astronomer takes you around the night sky – a traditional, live planetarium show.
14.30 : Galaxy Zoo Tour of the ROG site – Led by Jim, not only an ROG astronomer but also developer on a future Zoo project. Meet in the Planetarium Foyer.
15.15 : Recommended Planetarium Show – Dawn of the Space Age. In the 40th year since the Apollo landings, the ROG’s new show looks back to how it all began.
16.00 : Meet the Zookeeper – In the ‘Discovery Space’ in the main ROG building. On the eve before the largest gathering of Zookeepers in history (for a team meeting) this is your chance to chat to some of the team who come from further afield. Confirmed victims attendees are Bill ‘NGC 3314’ Keel, Carie ‘Peas’ Cardamone and Jordan ‘Motivation study’ Raddick. I will also be making a less exotic appearance, but should have the first results from Galaxy Zoo : Supernovae to show off.
I’m afraid that it’ll be necessary to book tickets for the planetarium shows, but the astronomy displays provide more than enough to keep you busy otherwise.
WHT joins the supernova hunt!
Greetings from the William Herschel Telescope at the Observatario del Roque de los Muchachos on La Palma, in the Canary Islands. Sarah and I have now arrived here, and tomorrow night, the 12th, we’ll join in the fun by observing some of the supernova candidates that you’ve identified in the PTF data. The weather here is currently perfect – beautiful dark clear skies, and incidentally a fantastic place to view the Perseid meteor shower.
Fingers crossed that this great weather remains for our two observing nights, and we can confirm those supernovae that you’ve been diligently hunting out. We’ll try to post regular updates tomorrow as to what we find out – though please bear with us if we appear slow to update; observing can sometimes be a very busy job!
Mark
Supernova Zoo updates
I’ve just added in the latest batch of images taken by the Palomar Transient Factory last night. The PTF surveys large areas the sky every night looking for new supernovae. The images from these observations are then run through an automated pipeline which flags potential new candidates which we show to you.
One of the most exciting aspects of Supernova Zoo is that we are showing Zooites images taken from the PTF telescope just hours earlier and if you mark it as something interesting then we very quickly show it to more people so we can get a definitive answer quickly. Finding new supernovae as early as possible is one of the main aims of Supernova Zoo, if and when we find something interesting Mark and Sarah are waiting to follow it up at the WHT.
Cheers
Arfon
Let's Go Supernova Hunting
We have a special challenge for you this week – Galaxy Zoo is going Supernova Hunting.
A supernova is an exploding star, capable of outshining an entire galaxy. We have a robotic telescope in Palomar, California sending us candidate objects from the galaxies it scans, and a team of Oxford astronomers are on their way to the Canary Islands to follow up the most likely.
The choice of galaxies to follow-up on is in your hands – we’ll be posting new data each day, and keeping a running list of those candidates that most Zooites think are likely supernovae. Get clicking…and you might well be the first to discover an exploding star.
Chris
(P.S. This is a prototype of a much larger project so all feedback and comments – good and bad – are of course welcome either here or on the forum.
