A research conference on interacting and merging galaxies just concluded today, hosted by East Tennessee State University under the title “Galaxy Wars: Stellar Populations and Star Formation in Interacting Galaxies”. This is a favorite topic of many in the Zoo, and, as you might expect, Galaxy Zoo was represented both in presentations and in the discussion.
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UPDATE: I, Jordan, am indeed the mystery blogger. Sorry about that – I forgot to click my name as the author. Thanks to Karen for solving the mystery! Also, the times are U.S. Eastern time (5 hours behind Greenwich time).

UPDATE THE SECOND: See below for a “time machine” that tells you when coverage will start in your local time zone.

Next week, the members of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey collaboration will be meeting in Princeton to talk about the present and future of the survey. Bob and I will be there to talk about Galaxy Zoo, and we’d like you to be there too.

For the first time, we’ll be giving you the opportunity to watch the meeting as it happens. We’ll be live-broadcasting the meeting on our channel on UStream TV, starting on Monday, July 27th at 8:30 AM U.S. Eastern Time. (UStream is a web site that lets you broadcast video from a hand-held camcorder over the Internet.) Head over to our UStream channel to see the broadcast schedule. The “time machine” below says what time it starts in cities around the world.

I’ll be available on the chat in the UStream channel to answer questions in real-time about the talks. Hope to see you on the broadcast!

Time machine

Among the new data we have now is a set of fabulous images taken late last year from the 3.5m WIYN telescope at Kitt Peak, Arizona. We were using a special rapid-guiding CCD camera, which tracks rapid motion due to the atmosphere or wind shaking the telescope, delivering even sharper images than the telescope normally would on long exposures At the end of a 3-night session observing overlapping galaxies to measure their dust content, I couldn’t help noticing that IC 2497 passed nearly overhead just at the start of morning twilight. The atmosphere had been unusually steady so our images were very good. Steady atmosphere, target straight overhead, fast-guiding camera – there was no way we’d pass up this opportunity. The combination paid off; our images in two of the filters were the sharpest ground-based images I’ve ever gotten from anywhere. I knew the telescope could reach that image quality, but never before had it done so for me. In some parts of the image, close to reference stars, the atmospheric blurring amounts to only four tenths of an arcsecond. (When I was in school, it was the received wisdom that the atmosphere would never allow images this sharp for more than a fraction of a second).
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One of the things that really annoys me about the way in which science crops up in the media is the complete lack of disagreement that’s covered. The impression is given that somewhere there is a big book of Scientific Truth from which we all read, thus guaranteeing harmony and steady progress. The truth is that behind every scientific paper lies many months of debate and argument, either clustered around a whiteboard or – in the case of the Galaxy Zoo team – often by email and phone calls. Even when papers are published disagreements remain, and it might be many years before disputes are finally resolved. That’s ok though, because uncertainty is where science can thrive – where we all agree with each other and theory matches observations there is little more to be done. As Isaac Asimov said, the most exciting words in science aren’t ‘Eureka! I’ve got it!’ but rather ‘Now, that’s funny’. When things don’t quite make sense, when there are people to convince then we have work to do.

I’ve been prompted to write this on the acceptance of our paper announcing the discovery of Hanny’s Voorwerp.

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Warning: This “History of the Peas” is rather long. At Carie’s request, Rick wrote a shorter version here.

The SDSS telescope has five colour filters, one of which is green. Like a rainbow played backwards as it splits in a prism, the colours from all filters are shown to us all at once, so we see them mixed and averaged out – usually twinkling blue star formation, golden ellipticals, and red faraway objects or nearby stars. When an object moves relative to Earth while the SDSS telescope images it, sometimes only gets through the green filter at one given time and thus leaves a pure green image in our pictures – which is usually the case with a camera glitch, one of the three images of asteroids, or satellite trails.

Some objects, though, seem to be green in their own right. We were all so busy in the first month of Galaxy Zoo trying to work out what pretty much anything was, and getting used to a hundred and one things new and strange, that not all of us (certainly not me) paid much attention to the random greenness. Those who did found a great variety of forms:

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Attention cloud hunters! With a lot of input and assistance from laihro, waveney, and ZookeeperKevin, I am pleased to announce a new specialized galaxy hunt, targeted at galaxies with active nuclei to pull out the ones with bright clouds in an organized way. At
http://wavwebs.com/GZ/voorwerpje/Hunt.cgi
you can go through SDSS images of known AGN and help us tell which ones are most likely to have the kind of gigantic ionized-gas clouds which can tell us about the history of the active nucleus and its surroundings. First you’ll see an introduction to why the problem is interesting, and offering some examples of what we’re looking for and some kinds of imposters we want to weed out. You can use existing logins from the merger and irregular classification projects if you have one – otherwise, feel free to join in. The more the merrier – or at the very least, the more, the faster and more statistically robust. And keep visiting – we’ll be augmenting the galaxy list with more AGN that are known but don’t have SDSS spectra, but it will take a little more time to get those identifications fed into the list.

Whence the web name? These clouds have a lot in common with Hanny’s Voorwerp, but are much smaller – so we go with the Dutch diminutive form “voorwerpje”. We do know of more than one, so “voorwerpjes” would also make sense.

Back in March I was speaking to a colleague of mine in Nottingham, Seb Foucaud, about the Galaxy Zoo Peas, and showing him Carie’s paper. Seb works primarily on very distant (high redshift) massive galaxies, often using data from the UKIDSS Ultra Deep Survey. He quickly noticed that the way Carie selected Peas from SDSS data was very similar to the way they select high redshift galaxies, except that the exact colours used were different, as more distant galaxies are redder.

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Sometimes in scientific research opportunities collide and lead to rather busy days. Yesterday I had such a day, and since it involved me giving two presentations about Galaxy Zoo I thought you might be interested to hear about it.

In the morning I gave a talk “Galaxy Evolution in the Galaxy Zoo”  at the “Unity of the Universe” conference in Portsmouth, a conference celebrating the opening of the new Dennis Sciama Building for the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation (ICG, where I and several other “Zoo Keepers” work). This talk was aimed at summarizing for astronomers and cosmologists at the meeting the exciting results on galaxy evolution which have come out of Galaxy Zoo. Many researchers in astronomy are aware of Galaxy Zoo, and in general are very interested in it, but they tend to think of it more an an opportunity for outreach with the interested general public and less in terms of the exciting science which can come out of it. The point of my talk was to say that it should in fact be viewed as both. It seemed to go over well.

Over lunch I took a train to London where in the afternoon I was interviewed by an esteemed panel of scientists (including Baroness Susan Greenfield, Director of the Royal Institution, and Prof. Alec Boksenberg, Chair of the UK National Commission for UNESCO). This interview was because I was a finalist in the competition for the 2009 L’Oreal UNESCO UK/Ireland Fellowships for Women in Science. My proposal for this fellowship (for £15000) was to extend my period of study at Portsmouth so I could spend more time studying the red spirals in Galaxy Zoo (among other things). I gave a 10 minute talk about this proposed research, then answered questions from the panel.

Later that afternoon I had a L’Oreal makeover (really – but don’t worry this was not a requirement for the fellowship just a treat, and a positive sign in my opinion of a recognition that scientists can want to be feminine) and in the evening I attended a reception at the Royal Institution at which the winners of the fellowship were announced. Unfortunately I did not win the competition, but as I did make the final 8 (out of 240 applicants) I can’t feel too bad about it. I also got a nice engraved pen, met some very interesting people, and I’m assured I can still expect some free makeup. So that’s not too bad after all!

Quite a busy day in the life of an astronomer!