Eight Years of Galaxy Zoo
It’s our eighth birthday! The team have done a great job exploring the various ways the number eight connects to the Galaxy Zoo Universe and that collection of blogs does a brilliant job of illustrating the dramatic variety of places we’ve explored together. Some of them were familiar, but others we didn’t even dream of before the start of the project.
An 8 for our 8th birthday!
Once you start thinking about it, thinking of Galaxy Zoo as an exploration, as a journey undertaken as a group makes a lot of sense. Lots of you have joined us for the whole journey, as we’ve travelled further and further from familiar ground, while others – just as welcome – have walked only a little way. The science team, too, has grown as it has become apparent quite how much can be done with your classifications, and the whole grand parade has attracted a following of computer scientists, web developers and other assorted camp followers.
I’m writing this on my way to report on the arrival of New Horizons at Pluto for the Sky at Night. For the first time, we’ll see close up images of a world that until now has been little more than a point of light. The missions is part of the glorious tradition of Solar System exploration, but our journey through the datasets provided by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and by Hubble are voyages of exploration too. We need not travel to distant galaxies to understand them; encountering something new and never-before-seen in your web browser is thrill enough. Thanks for all the classifications of the last eight years – here’s to many more.
Chris
Eight years and eight different types of galaxy images
One of the wonderful things we’ve been able to do with Galaxy Zoo over the years is to use the same site to classify many different types of images of the sky. These include surveys that come from a range of telescopes, both on the ground and in space, images at a range of wavelengths, and covering different areas of the sky. We need these different sets of images because they drive the wide variety of scientific questions that the science team studies using galaxy morphology. As part of our celebration of eight years of Galaxy Zoo, I wanted to highlight the different datasets we’ve been able to classify over the years.
Sloan Digital Sky Survey (Legacy Sample)
The bulk of the data used in both the original Galaxy Zoo and Galaxy Zoo 2 projects. These images were taken by the SDSS telescope, located in the mountains of New Mexico, and provided almost 900,000 individual galaxies that volunteers helped to classify.
Spiral galaxies from SDSS and Galaxy Zoo (Lintott et al. 2008)
COSMOS (Hubble Space Telescope)
The Cosmological Evolution Survey (COSMOS) was a dedicated campaign to image the same 2-square-degree field of the sky with more than a dozen telescopes, from radio through X-ray. 86,314 images of galaxies in the COSMOS field taken with Hubble were classified as part of the Galaxy Zoo: Hubble project.
Unbarred spiral galaxies from COSMOS and classified in GZ: Hubble. From Melvin et al. (2014).
CANDELS (Hubble Space Telescope)
The Cosmic Assembly Near-Infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS) was the largest project in the history of Hubble, with the equivalent of more than four straight months of observing time. Using the near-infrared WFC3 camera, Hubble image some of the earliest massive galaxies, formed only 2-3 billion years after the Big Bang. 49,555 images from CANDELS were classified in Galaxy Zoo from 2012-2013.
Disk galaxies in GZ:CANDELS, including those without bars (top row) and those with bars (bottom row). From Simmons et al. (2014).
UKIDSS (infrared images)
The United Kingdom Infrared Telescope, located near the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawai’i, carried out a large survey at infrared wavelengths, ranging from 1 to 3 microns. This survey (UKIDSS) allows us to compare morphologies of the same galaxies between optical and infrared, probing the effects of galactic dust and different stellar populations. 70,503 galaxies from UKIDSS have been classified by Galaxy Zoo volunteers.
A spiral galaxy with dust lanes, seen in both the optical (SDSS; left) and the infrared (UKIDSS; right).
FERENGI (artificially-redshifted)
One of the critical issues with all Galaxy Zoo data has been calibration of the morphologies we measure, especially in distant galaxies where small and/or faint images can affect the accuracy of classifications. Using a piece of software called FERENGI, we artificially processed SDSS images to make them appear as if they were much further away, and we’re using those classifications to calibrate the data from Hubble. This included 6,624 images of galaxies at a range of distances and brightnesses.
An SDSS image of a barred spiral, artificially processed to appear as if it were at a variety of distances.
GOODS (Hubble Space Telescope)
The Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS) is another multi-wavelength survey of the sky, focusing on data from NASA’s flagship space telescopes of Hubble, Chandra, and Spitzer (plus others). We not only study high-redshift galaxies using GOODS data in Galaxy Zoo, but also measure how increasing the sensitivity of the images can change the apparent morphology. 11,157 GOODS images have been classified in Galaxy Zoo at both shallow and deep imaging depths.
Comparison of the GOODS images classified in Galaxy Zoo. The left shows shallower images with only 2 sets of exposures; the right shows the deeper images with 5 sets of exposure.
Flipping spiral galaxies
One of the very first Galaxy Zoo papers addressed a fundamental question: are spiral galaxies in the Universe more likely to spin clockwise, counterclockwise, or equally likely in both directions? To measure this, we used images of spiral galaxies that were artificially flipped, which helped us correct for a psychological bias in the human brain that exhibits a slight preference for counterclockwise spins.
Images of four spiral galaxies, both as the originals (top) and horizontally flipped (bottom).
Single-band SDSS (ugriz)
The latest new set of data used SDSS galaxies again. Instead of making the “color” images that we’ve used before, however, Galaxy Zoo volunteers were asked to classify images from the five individual filters in SDSS, spanning light from the near-ultraviolet to the near-infrared. This will allow us to better measure how morphology can change as a function of observing wavelength, and determine which physical processes in the galaxy are responsible for the light that defines how we measure the shapes.
Single-band filter images of galaxies from the SDSS.
More to come soon. Thanks again for all your help with what we’ve done so far!!!
Eight years and 8 billion years of cosmic history
Next up in our series of eight blog posts celebrating eight years of Galaxy Zoo is this post from Tom Melvin, who was the lead author of the the first publication from Galaxy Zoo: Hubble, which looked at how the fraction of barred disk galaxies has evolved over the last eight billion years. Tom is also the first person to write a PhD thesis substantially based on Galaxy Zoo classifications, which he is in the process of completing final corrections for.
Barred disc galaxies at high redshift identified by Galaxy Zoo Hubble. The redshift (‘z’) and the fraction of volunteers identifying a bar (‘Pbar’) are noted in each image.
This was the first time the Galaxy Zoo volunteers had been asked to classify galaxies taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, which provided beautiful images of galaxies whose light has taken up to eight billion light years to reach us!
With your classifications, we were able to select a sample of disk and barred disk galaxies, as shown above in Figure 1, and explore how the fraction of disk galaxies that are barred has evolved over the last eight billion years. We found that this bar fraction has been increasing as the Universe has grown older, doubling from 11% eight billion years ago to 22% four billion years ago, which is shown below in Figure 2. We also know from Galaxy Zoo 2 that this continues to increase, with around one third of disks having a bar in our local Universe. We were able to expand on this by showing that it was the most massive disk galaxies that were the driver of this evolution.
Redshift evolution of the fraction of barred disc galaxies. Each point represents the observed bar fraction in a 0.3 Gyr bin, with the number of barred disc galaxies and total number of disc galaxies indicated. The grey shaded region indicates the error on the measurement. We show the mean bar fraction for the whole sample (fbar = 13.3 ± 0.7%) as the horizontal dot-dashed line, as well as a linear relationship between the bar fraction and the lookback time which is shown by the solid line.
As bars tend to only form in disk galaxies that are settled and relaxed, or ‘mature’, our results showing an increasing bar fraction over the last eight billion years tells us that the disk galaxy population has matured as the Universe has aged. As this evolution is being driven by the most massive disk galaxies, we were able to conclude that the most massive disk galaxies become mature sooner than their lower mass counterparts.
In addition to these results, we were able to identify a population of ‘red spiral’ galaxies thanks to your classifications. These red spirals’ would typically be omitted from other disk samples, as they would be classified as elliptical galaxies – but as you can see below, these are clearly beautiful red spiral galaxies! What is interesting about this population of disks is that their bar fraction of 45% is much higher than the bar fraction of the whole disk sample, which is roughly 14%.
Images showing 3 unbarred (images a − c) and 3 barred (images d − f) “red spiral” galaxies from Galaxy Zoo Hubble.
So, thanks to your help classifying the amazing images from the Hubble Space Telescope, we were able to track the evolving bar fraction of disk galaxies over the last eight billion years. There is plenty more to be done with this sample of galaxies, so keep an eye out for future results looking at how galaxies have evolved over the past eight billion years!
8 kpc – The approximate distance of the Sun from the centre of our Galaxy
Our sun is one of a hundred billion or so stars in the Milky Way, travelling in relative peace in the outskirts of our home galaxy. About 8 kiloparsec (26 thousand light years) from us in the constellation Sagittarius lies the center of the Milky Way. It can be difficult to see all the way to the center due to the enormous amounts of gas and dust in the way, but astronomers have managed to pierce this veil to study the heart of the Milky Way galaxy.
Two teams of astronomers, one based in Germany at the Max Planck Institute for extraterrestrial Physics (great name!) and the University of California Los Angeles tracked the motion of stars using state of the art infrared cameras in the very heart of the Milky Way and found something remarkable. The stars in the center of our galaxy all orbit the same empty spot.
(Source http://www.galacticcenter.astro.ucla.edu/animations.html)
It was as if there were some great mass in the center and the stars all orbited it. When they calculated the mass of this dark object, it came back as four *million* times the mass of the sun. The only object so small, yet so massive, is a black hole. So next time you see Sagittarius in the night sky, think of the monster lurking there.
We now know that almost all galaxies contain such a supermassive black hole in the center, and the true monsters can be much more massive: up to ten billion solar masses in the centers of the most massive galaxies. When these black holes feast on gas and dust, they can light up as active galactic nuclei or quasars.
The Galaxy Zoo team has been working hard to understand the connection between galaxies and their black holes for the last 8 years, and we’ve learned a lot! Hanny’s Voorwerp has told us much about what black holes are really up to, and your classifications for so many SDSS galaxies has really helped us to understand this “co-evolution” better!
In the case of the Milky Way, we can see the echoes of recent outbursts of feeding from our black hole, from light echoes travelling across molecular clouds in the center, to the enigmatic Fermi bubbles, which many astronomers suspect are the aftermath of a powerful burst of accretion by our black hole.
(Source http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap101110.html)
All this, just 8 kiloparsec from our home solar system…. it’s really not that far away!
Eight Years & the 8th Paper: Green Peas – Living Fossils of Galaxy Evolution
As we approach the 8th anniversary of the Galaxy Zoo project, it is a great opportunity to look back at one of the most fascinating discoveries of citizen science in Galaxy Zoo – the “Green Pea” galaxies. Volunteers on the forum first noted these galaxies due to their peculiar bright green color and small size. Their discovery was published in our 8th paper: ‘Galaxy Zoo Green Peas: discovery of a class of compact extremely star-forming galaxies’ and is noted on the blog here. But the story doesn’t end with their discovery.
Top Row: Green Peas in the original imaging are compact & bright green.
Bottom Row: Green Pea galaxies as imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope show patches of starformation.
In the years since the publication of their discovery paper by the Galaxy Zoo Science Team, the Green Peas are beginning to fulfill their promise as a living fossil of galaxy evolution. Because they aren’t too far away, they provide a unique local laboratory in which we can investigate processes key to the formation and evolution of galaxies in the early universe. They are living ‘fossils,’ undergoing extraordinary, intense starbursts unlike any other galaxies known in the local universe. Their color is due to a large amount of emission in an oxygen line [OIII]/5007A that made their appearance green in the images.
Follow-up studies of the Green Peas have looked in great detail at their abundances of various elements, something that cannot be done in their high redshift analogs. The results of these studies show that they have energetic outflows of gas and lower oxygen abundances than other typical local galaxies with similar masses. They also suggest what might be responsible for ionizing the gas in the galaxies and producing those bright emission lines (e.g., Wolf-Rayet stars). Their clumpy morphologies (or shapes) have been confirmed and suggest that star formation in the peas occurs in several separate knots throughout the galaxy. Their radio emission implies they have strong magnetic fields, larger than that of the Milky Way. All of these results paint a picture of galaxies very similar to those that formed in the early Universe.
This image shows radio emission detected from a combination (stack) of 32 different Green Pea Galaxies.
Results from studies of these galaxies can provide challenges to commonly accepted models. For example, the strong magnetic fields challenge models that suggest magnetic fields grow slowly over time and observations of the variation in Lyman alpha emission line profiles and strengths challenge models of the dependence of the emission line shape on gas properties in the galaxy. The Green Peas have held up their promise of lending new insights into galaxy evolution by characterizing an active mode of star formation, which contrasts with the typical more passive evolution dominating the local galaxy population. Studies of the Peas have suggested that a galaxy’s evolutionary pathway may depend on stochastic initial conditions, leading insights into our understandings of how galaxies throughout the Universe form.
Eight Years and the 8th Most Cited Paper from Galaxy Zoo
At Galaxy Zoo we’re really proud of our publication record – 48 papers and counting, just from the team using your classifications. In academic research one of the most important numbers a published paper has is the number which counts how many citations that paper has – simply a count of the number of other academic publications mention your work.
And we’re not only proud of the Galaxy Zoo publication record, but the citation record is becoming impressive too (if we do say so ourselves). For this post in the lead up to the 8th anniversary of the launch of Galaxy Zoo, here are the 8 most cited of our papers:
1. Lintott et al. 2008: “Galaxy Zoo: morphologies derived from visual inspection of galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey “(with 279 citations)
2. Bamford et al. 2009: “Galaxy Zoo: the dependence of morphology and colour on environment” (219 citations)
3. Lintott et al. 2011: “Galaxy Zoo 1: data release of morphological classifications for nearly 900 000 galaxies” (152 citations)
4. Skibba et al. 2009: “Galaxy Zoo: disentangling the environmental dependence of morphology and colour” (114 citations)
5. Schawinski et al. 2010: “Galaxy Zoo: The Fundamentally Different Co-Evolution of Supermassive Black Holes and Their Early- and Late-Type Host Galaxies” (102 citations)
6. Cardamone et al. 2009: “Galaxy Zoo Green Peas: discovery of a class of compact extremely star-forming galaxies” (101 citations)
7. Darg et al 2010: “Galaxy Zoo: the properties of merging galaxies in the nearby Universe – local environments, colours, masses, star formation rates and AGN activity” (92 citations)
8. Masters et al. 2010: “Galaxy Zoo: passive red spirals” (86 citations)
I’m personally especially proud of paper number 8 on that list, because it is one of the first papers I led making use of Galaxy Zoo classifications (and one of my most cited first author papers in fact). In that paper we explored the properties of the unusually passive (ie. not star forming) red spirals that had been noted in both Bamford et al. 2009 and Skibba et al. 2009. For astronomers this is one of the more well known discoveries from Galaxy Zoo, and these passive red spirals continue to be studied for what they can reveal about the modes of evolution of galaxies in our Universe, and that many spirals must stop forming stars before they lose their spiral structure.
A red elliptical and blue spiral (top), with a blue elliptical and red spiral (lower).
(By the way for academics who might be interested the h-index of Galaxy Zoo is 24).
Eight Years and the 8 Most Talked-About Galaxies in Galaxy Zoo
Continuing the countdown to Galaxy Zoo’s 8th birthday, below are 8 of the most-commented-on galaxies in the active Galaxy Zoo. They range near (in astronomical terms) and far, from gorgeous disks to space-warping groups, and some of them aren’t even galaxies at all!
8. Galaxies Interacting (Arp 112)
#merger #arc #g-pair #bulge #tidaltails #ugc #wow #agn #ngc #ngc7806 #arp #markarian #dustlane #available_in_dr7 #spiral #gpair #awesome #tidal #lens #no_lens
A lovely example of the diversity of structures in the Universe. The central galaxy may have been a perfectly symmetric spiral before it was seriously disturbed by the elliptical galaxy on the left side of the shot, and what’s that wispy thing off to the right? Is it a former part of the central galaxy? And what is this all going to look like in a few billion years? Whatever happens, the volunteers made it clear this is a special one to classify and to look at.
#lens #lensing #knownlens #arc #lense #interesting
This gorgeous gravitational lens was spotted almost immediately upon the launch of the new Galaxy Zoo within the high-redshift CANDELS data. It generated multiple lively discussions and scientists and volunteers alike weighed in with further information. It turned out in this case that this was one of very few lenses that were already known, but there are likely still unknown lenses buried in the data, waiting to be discovered!
#quasar #edge #lbg #star
Initially identified as a high-redshift star-forming galaxy by one of our seasoned volunteers, a number of people subsequently looked further into the existing scientific literature. There was a lot of debate about this particular point of light, but in the end the volunteers uncovered a later paper confirming that this green gem (which would actually be either very red or nearly invisible to the human eye, as it’s “green” because it only shows up in the infrared filters used for this image) is actually just a star in our galaxy. Bummer, maybe, but this process is also an important part of science.
#dustlane #polar #polarring #beautiful #polar-ring #elliptical #ring #edgeon #mothership #dust #polaring #question
This spectacular example of a polar ring galaxy couldn’t have been found in the original Galaxy Zoo or Galaxy Zoo 2, because it only made it into the Sloan Digital Sky Survey when the sky coverage was extended.
#merger #arp148 #arp #available_in_dr7 #lookalike #alphabet #ring
It takes a special kind of galaxy crash to make a collisional ring, and you can see this one in progress. It reminded our volunteers and scientists of the Cartwheel galaxy, another spectacular example of these snapshots of a brief moment in time.
#merger #odd #dark #needle #holycow #wow #doublenucleus #tidaldebris #disturbed #rocket #cluster #irregularshape #spaceship #rocketship
Well, this is odd. This galaxy looks like it’s on its own, but it has a rather unusual shape that would usually imply some sort of interaction or collision. Our volunteers discussed what could be causing it – until they viewed a zoomed-out image and it became clear that this galaxy has recently flown by a trio of galaxies, which would be more than enough to disrupt it into this lovely shape.
2. Hubble Resolves the Distant Universe
#spiral #overlap #dustlane #starburst #edge-on #edgeon
When a new batch of data taken by the Hubble Space Telescope appeared on the latest Galaxy Zoo, this was one of the first stunners remarked on by several people. Some of the parts of the sky covered by Hubble coincide with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and we linked the surveys up via Talk. Our tireless volunteers launched a thread collecting side-by-side images from SDSS and Hubble, showcasing the power of the world’s greatest space telescope. Hubble’s primary mirror is about the same size as that used by the SDSS, so the differences between the images of the same galaxy are due to the blurring effect of the atmosphere.
SDSS (on Earth) at left, HST (in space) at right.
And, the most talked about image in the latest Galaxy Zoo is…
It’s always the galaxies you least expect.
Okay, okay… If you saw this and said it looks like there isn’t a lot to talk about here, I wouldn’t blame you. And, indeed, there’s only one “short” comment from one of our volunteers, who used our Examine tools and discovered that this little blotch appears to be a very high-redshift galaxy.
However, that same volunteer also started a discussion with the question: just for fun, what’s the highest redshift you’ve found? Others responded, and thus began a quest to find the galaxy in Galaxy Zoo that is the farthest distance from us. This discussion is Galaxy Zoo at its finest, with new and experienced volunteers using the project as inspiration for their own investigations, scouring the scientific literature, and learning about the very early Universe.
It seems like the most likely known candidate so far is a quasar at a redshift of about 5.5 (at which point the Universe was about 1 billion years old), or, if you don’t think a quasar counts, an extended galaxy at z = 4 or so (1.5 billion years old). But there’s just so much science wonderfulness here, all of it from our fantastic volunteers, and it all started with a patchy blob and a sense of curiosity.
Galaxy Zoo started with a million blobs (ish) and a sense of adventure. I think that’s fitting.
Eight years, eight Hubble Voorwerpje targets
It’s a week until the 8th anniversary of the launch of Galaxy Zoo.
The Hubble Space Telescope observations of giant ionized Voorwerpje clouds near galaxies with active nuclei, many found for the first time though the effort of Galaxy Zoo participants gives us another 8 – one at the end of a long road of numbers. 16,000 galaxies with known or possible active nuclei, 200 highly-ranked cloud candidates based on input from 185 participants, 50 spectroscopic observations, 19 giant ionized clouds, among which we found 8 with evidence that the nucleus has faded dramatically (and then observed by one Hubble Space Telescope). (You wondered where the numeral 8 would come in by now… and there is another one hidden below.) The first batch of scientific results from analysis of these images was described here, and the NASA/ESA press release with beautiful visualizations of the multi-filter image data can be seen here. As a visual summary, here are the images, with starlight and emission from [O III] and H-alpha shown in roughly true visual color.
This project was an outgrowth of the discovery of Hanny’s Voorwerp, which remains probably the signature discovery of Galaxy Zoo. In astronomy, one is a pet rock, ten is a statistically valid sample – so we wanted to know more about how common such clouds might be, and what they could tell us about quasars more generally. Zoo participants answered this challenge magnificently.
The scientific interest in these objects and their history remains intense, and observations continue. I’ve recently finished processing integral-field spectra from the 8-meter Gemini-North telescope, where we have spectra at every point in a small field of view near the nucleus, and just recently we learned that our proposal for spectra in a few key areas at the high resolution of the Hubble telescope has been approved for the coming year.
Even (or especially) for kinds of objects behind its original statistical goals, Galaxy Zoo has provided an amazing ride these last 8 years. Stay with us – and if you see weirdly colored clouds around galaxies, feel free to flag them in Talk!
Galaxy Zoo 