Galaxy Zoo amongst "Top 10 Scientific Endeavours of 2008"
Universe Today recently announced their Top 10 Scientific Endeavours of 2008, as voted for by their readers.
The Galaxy Zoo team were very pleased to find that Galaxy Zoo, and more specifically the discovery of Hanny’s Voorwerp, came in at number 8. This puts us in such fine company as exoplanet imaging, the Phoenix Mars Lander and the Large Hadron Collider!
Universe Today’s previous story on the Voorwerp is available here.
An introduction
Hello. I’m new around here and I thought I should introduce myself. My name is Arfon Smith and I’m the latest addition to the Galaxy Zoo team. I’ve been appointed to the role of technical lead and I’m looking forward to working with Chris in Oxford on some really exciting new stuff for future versions of Galaxy Zoo.
Galaxy Zoo is a great project and a perfect fit for my two main interests, Astronomy and Software. I have a PhD in Astrochemistry from The University of Nottingham where I studied the role that dust has to play in a variety of astrophysical environments.
More recently I have been working as a software developer at The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (Human Genome Project) near Cambridge. At Sanger, I’ve been working on web applications to support the high-throughput sequencing of DNA. It’s been a great experience but I’m really looking forward to being back in the astronomical community.
Anyway, that’s about all for now! For those of you interested, I’ll be blogging about some more technical aspects of the software development process going on behind the scenes at Galaxy Zoo. Look out for updates soon!
As promised – photos!
Chris giving his talk while wearing a pink shirt:
Kevin with his opening slide, which generated some applause from the audience:
Chris and Kevin take joint questions after both talks:
More from Chris's talk – red spirals
Chris told me in the pub yesterday that “it’s nice to give a Galaxy Zoo talk where people are already familiar with the story; it means that people already know the story.” That’s a testament to the success of your classifications — from what I’ve seen at this meeting, it seems that in just a year and a half, Galaxy Zoo has gone through evolved from a cool new strategy for doing science to a source of exciting research results. The results Chris presented about red spirals were particularly interesting. Karen Masters has blogged about these red spirals before. Spiral galaxies usually contain lots of young, blue stars, but these “red spirals” contain old, red stars. What this means is that the formation of new stars in these galaxies has been shut off. Galaxy Zoo’s contribution — your contribution — has been to show that red spirals most often live at the edge of galaxy clusters. They are clusters that have just begun to move toward the centers of clusters due to the clusters’ gravitational attraction. The attraction of the galaxy clusters has led to new star formation being shut off, but not to the shape of the galaxy changing — a process that Chris called “gentle strangulation.” The gravitational attraction is just right — enough to shut off star formation, but not enough to deform the galaxy.
A zoo-tiful morning
Day 2 of the AAS meeting is here. The Zoo team talks were yesterday. The scheduling has been a bit odd at this meeting – Chris and Kevin’s talk was in a session about galaxies, while at the same time Bob was chairing a session on cosmology with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey in which Daniel was speaking. I was able to see all the talks by staying for Chris’s and Kevin’s, then switching rooms in time to see Daniel’s. I took photos of Chris and Kevin giving their talks – photos are coming soon, after I go back to the hotel to retrieve my camera’s transfer cable.Chris went first. He started by reviewing the Zoo in general, then reviewed some of the results from the red spirals and mergers projects. Chris has graciously agreed to make his slides available on the blog, but I am having trouble getting the blog to upload the PDF file. I’ll see if I can get someone to help me with it. Meanwhile, here is the first slide to tantalize you:
Kevin went next, talking about the blue ellipticals that he has written about on this blog in the past. The biggest hit of his talk, though, was his title slide, which was written in galaxies! The slide was made by Pat from the Galaxy Zoo forum. I have a photo of it that I will post later on.
When I get a few spare minutes, I’ll post some more about these talks, and about the Sloan cosmology session.
Liveblogging – AAS meeting
Greetings from Long Beach, California! I’m here along with Chris, Kevin, Bob, and Daniel Thomas at the twice-annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society.As we’ve done at previous meetings, I’ll be liveblogging events at the meeting. Between now and Thursday, I’ll be posting in real time about what I see and do at this meeting. Some of the other zookeepers will probably blog also.I’m part of a larger team of bloggers that is covering the meeting. You can follow the coverage at the Astronomy Cast Live blog.First up, at 10 AM Pacific time (7 PM GMT) is Chris and Kevin both talking about Galaxy Zoo results. See you then!
Conditions Improving
I am halfway through our penultimate night and, as expected, the weather is still poor though much better than the previous night. In total it left about 2-3 feet of snow (Pic A) and for most of the day it looked as though the telescope would remain non-operational. Lots of ice had collected on the dish and the receivers. After about an hour into our scheduled run though, there was a short spell when the stars came out and the satellite images suggested the cloudy front had finally passed. The first thing needed was for the operator to get on the raised platform and knock off all the ice from the receiver (Pic B). They also heated the dish to melt the ice though this meant that our calibrations would be off for a while since the receivers basically work by measuring temperature differences. Anyhow, we got underway with some Blue Elliptical galaxies a bit later and I thought that things would pick up quickly. Unfortunately, more cloud soon moved in and it was very hard to get a good signal. I had to resort to pointing at Saturn for readings which is not ideal because Saturn is large compared with our beam and so its not great at calibrating the exact centre of the direction in which the telescope points. In any case, by the time we were taking readings it started snowing again and we had to shut down. Hopefully it will have cleared up by day break and we can get a few good readings in. I also managed to get a picture of Senor Zorro with the flash at a distance. If this isn’t the epitome of evil, then I’m not sure what is (Pic C)!
Pictures: (A) Snow, (B) Icicles and (C) Evil.
Iram Now 30cm Under!!!
The bad weather continues to badden. The telescope has now been down for about 36 hours and the first night of the blue ellipticals project has saddly gone to waste. There is atleast a foot of snow now and the dish is covered in icicles (pictured). The forecast isn’t good for tomorrow either so our best hope for results will probably be in the 5-hour stretch just before we finish on Monday!
In other news, Senor Zorro came back last night, pining at the window for more of my hard earned champagne! I thought I better include this picture as it brings out the evil in his eyes. 
IRAM 30m – 30mm Under!
We’re almost 30 hours into our observing run to examine “Molecular Gas in Merging Spirals” and virtually the whole time we’ve been shut down due to weather! Tonight we’re expecting 3cm of snow which is great news for the skiers (who seem to be enjoying perfect blue skies during the day) but disastrous for detecting CO gas from galaxies. IRAM can see through some cloud, but when the air is completely saturated with water there is no possibility of getting a clean signal. The most exciting thing to happen so far occurred last night (New Years Eve) when I left a small bottle of champagne outside in the snow to chill it for midnight GMT. When I went out to fetch it though, I found it had disappeared with a set of fox prints leading up to and then away from it! Tonight at dinner the fox (“Zorro” in Spanish) came by the dining room looking for food (the IRAM staff treat them as pets and feed them often) though I reckon it was after more of my champagne. (Pictures to follow soon – I forgot my USB cable).
Since tonight was the last night we were scheduled for the mergers, we’ll have to reapply to come back later on this year! Tomorrow we shift projects to the Blue Ellipticals thought the forecast isn’t good so we’ll probably be seeing more of IRAM soon. Great start to 2009! (Next time I’m here I’m bringing a foxhound).
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Update: Pictures of the Fox, and snow on the dish:
Happy New Year
New Year marked the start of night two of our observing run. We finished observing yesterday at just after midday – radio astronomers laugh at both sun and, in our case, cloud. The result’s weren’t great; we lost more than five hours completely to strong winds which might have been dangerous to the telescope, and the rest of the data was pretty shoddy. Not only that, but Daniel beat me soundly at first chess and then billiards.Tonight isn’t looking very good either – we’re struggling even to point the telescope at extremely bright objects – but I did at least join in with the Spanish tradition of eating twelve grapes in twelve seconds to welcome in the New Year. Let’s hope it brings us some luck.
Galaxy Zoo 