Spin correlations, part I
This is the first of the two blogs that are dedicated to our latest paper, that we already advertised here. The topic is fascinating, but quite tough to understand for the first time. Have patience and enjoy.
Every single high-school textbook that I come across has the spinning ice-skater story hidden somewhere in the section on the angular momentum. The main question is, how do ice-skaters manage to spin-up to these dazzling spinning velocities? The answer lies in carefully observing what they do: they spin up a little bit, by pushing with their legs and with their arms outstretched and then they spin-up by bringing their arms towards their bodies. The physics behind it is the conservation of angular momentum. You can watch an edifying Youtube video that incidentally include an ice-skater here.
Hanny's Voorwerp On Tour – Part 1
Yesterday Chris announced that Galaxy Zoo will be on The Sky At Night this weekend and that Patrick Moore interviewed me for that episode about the discovery of Hanny’s Voorwerp. As most of you probably know, we’ve been in the press a lot lately, and I’m keeping a list of relevant links on the forum.
Today I can announce that I’ll be a guest in the Dutch TV show ‘De Wereld Draait Door‘ (The World Keeps Turning) this Monday, (8th of September). It’s a well-known national and live daily talk show on channel ‘Nederland 3’ from 7.30 till 8.15pm (CEST). According to Wikipedia numbers show that it’s one of the most popular programmes on the channel.
So, tomorrow I’ll be travelling to the studios in Amsterdam and soon I’ll tell you all about part two of the ‘tour’.
Hanny.
Galaxy Zoo on Sky at Night
I’m delighted to confirm that this month’s Sky at Night will cover Galaxy Zoo. Patrick talked to Hanny earlier in the summer, and Bob, Kate and I spent some of last weekend talking in front of the cameras. We talked for more than an hour, and the team led by producer Jane Fletcher have spent the last week editing us down so that we fit within the programme. I have no idea what they’ve come up with, and am looking forward to seeing it.
There are many, many ways to get to watch this gem of televisual entertainment :
If you’re in the UK :
BBC One : Midnight, Sunday night (ie early Monday morning), repeated on Saturday 13th at 2pm on BBC Two.
BBC Four : Special EXTENDED edition (30 minutes instead of BBC one’s 20) : Tuesday evening at 7.30pm, repeated at 1.35am on Wednesday morning.
The show will also be available on the iplayer for a week after broadcast.
If you’re not in the UK :
The show will turn up on our webpage at a week or two after broadcast.
edited by Edd to update BBC Four broadcast time
Where does everyone come from?
While you are busy clicking away at the mergers, it has been straight forward to record where in the world everybody is. (This comes from your IP address).
Paper number 6 online…
I’ll let Anze tell you the story in more detail, but I wanted to point out that the 6th Galaxy Zoo paper is now available online.
We’ve decided to make this one public just before submitting it to the journal – you can find it here. Thanks, as always, for making this possible.
Galaxy Zoo at Dragon*Con
Imperial stormtroopers! Spartan soldiers! Functional robots! Flesh-eating zombies! Red-shirted Federation Starfleet conscripts clearly marked “Expendable”! Aliens of every shape and hue! This all sounds like a late-night film festival, and that’s part of it – but these all mean that I just returned from the 2008 edition of Dragon*Con in Atlanta. This annual event is among the worlds largest gatherings for people interested in science fiction, fantasy, gaming, the electronic world – and science. Read More…
Come and Join Us!
When Alice and the Zookeepers asked if some of us would like to contribute to the Blog I thought I would use the opportunity to grab the attention of any newbies who wander this way and might wonder what all the fuss is about and why people are still clicking after a year of classifying.
Well here’s my story…
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Galaxy Zoo meetups in North America?
UPDATE: There are plans afoot for a California meetup on September 27th! Read about it on the forum, and go if you can!
One of the greatest things about Galaxy Zoo has been the real-life meetings it has inspired, and the friendships that have resulted from these interactions. Alice wrote two wonderful blogposts (1 and 2) about the first set of meetups, and there have been more since then.
So far, though, the meetups have all taken place in the UK (as far as I know – although they have been attended by people from continental Europe). Galaxy Zoo has a lot of volunteers in the rest of the world that have thus far missed out on the fun of a Galaxy Zoo meetup.Fortunately, the Galaxy Zoo forum has taken up the challenge by discussing potential North American Galaxy Zoo meetups. Garrett_cw posted a thread on July 18th. Since then, the thread has evolved and lots of great suggestions have been made. The trouble, of course, is that North America is a big continent – so we’ll need several meetups for all of us to meet.
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Liveblog: Jim Gunn on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
As Chris mentioned last Saturday, scientists from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey have gathered in Chicago to review accomplishments and look ahead to the future. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is the project that provided all the images for Galaxy Zoo; but additionally, it has provided some of the most amazing results in astronomy over the past decade or so.
The final talk of the conference was given by Jim Gunn, an astronomer at Princeton who has spent most of the past 20 years guiding SDSS from its initial planning stages to today. Jim was an excellent choice to give the talk. Chris was in the audience too, and liveblogged the talk from his blog, so you can see how two people from the same audience interpret in the same talk.
Here is what I recorded during the talk yesterday:
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Give Peas a Chance
Hi Pea Hunters,
Kevin and I wanted to give you an update with where we are in our Peas investigation. We haven’t answered all of our questions, but from detailed inspections of their spectra, it appears that the Peas are a mixed bag. A large portion of them appears to be powered by star formation, and perhaps an equal number show evidence of an active central black hole. The details of what I’ve done so far are below. Feel free to chime in with any questions or suggestions you all might have! The first thing I did was look at all of the peas that were highly rated as Green in our Pea Picker hunt. When I plotted them against a sample of randomly selected galaxies of at similar redshifts, they do stand out. This first plot is a color-magnitude diagram. In my opinion its one of the most widely used of all plots astronomers can make. Practically, this is probably because only 2 images are necessary to make this plot, but also historically because we’ve found out plots like these can tell us so much (eg. the HR diagram).
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Galaxy Zoo 