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.
More Hubble Features, and More Often!
Here at Zooniverse HQ we’ve been thinking a bit more about those “fuzzy blobs” we talked about during our last hangout. Many of those faint galaxies are among the most distant objects we’ve ever seen, so we really want to learn about how they’ve formed and what they look like, but in some cases they are just too faint to get a really detailed classification. We can probably learn what their overall shape is, and possibly tell whether they’re disturbed or interacting, but spiral arms? Bars? Bulge strength? Not likely. Read More…
Talk at International Astronomical Union – video and write up now available.
Way back in August I gave a evening (public) plenary talk about “The Zoo of Galaxies” at the 28th General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union. I wrote a couple of blog posts about it at the time (here and a bit more here). Just this week I got word that the video is now available, so here it is:
To go with this I have also posted the “proceedings” (a write-up based on my talks) which will be appearing in the 16th Volume of “Highlights of Astronomy”. This is available on the arxiv. It’s not supposed to be a transcript as such, but if you watch both the video and read this I think you’ll see they’re quite similar.
Space Lasers and the Cosmic Martini: Removing Data Artifacts
As long as there are big data surveys, there will be data artifacts. Our corner of Astronomy is no exception: although the vast majority of images in SDSS and CANDELS are of high quality and therefore of high scientific value, poor quality images do still exist. The Galaxy Zoo team has worked hard to remove as many as possible from both samples so most “bad” images never even make it into the database, but this process is imperfect because computers have trouble identifying every kind of artifact (for some of the same reasons they have trouble identifying different galaxy types).
Of course, as we’ve seen time and again, Galaxy Zoo users have no problem whatsoever spotting the things the computers miss:
Not a Green Pea unless the universe is Tomato Soup.
The thread on Talk where this image was discussed pointed out that this was in the “Cosmic Scarf” of SDSS, where most of the fields have poor image quality:
Now, most of the fields in the zoomed-out image above were removed from the database and will never be shown on the website, but even the parts that look okay in the zoomed-out image don’t look so great when you zoom in. SDSS combines a number of its quality flags to give each field a “score” from 0 (terrible) to 1 (excellent) to assess its quality, but it’s not always that reliable. For example, although fields with scores larger than 0.6 are generally considered good, this field has a score of 0.77 but is clearly not quite right:
And this field has a much lower score of 0.37 but the images are classifiable:
So any choice we made at the beginning based just on the computer evaluations was going to leave some artifacts in, and we chose to err on the side of showing as many classifiable images as possible (increasing the number of artifacts kept in).
The good news is that Galaxy Zoo has always been adaptable, improving with input from all its participants. Now that this field has been flagged, the science team is working on a two-pronged approach: first, removing the entire “cosmic scarf” should immediately help prevent the majority of these big groups of artifacts from being loaded onto the server. Second, we’re working on finding a better method of removing those artifacts that remain, using your classifications and also your hashtags on Talk. (We’re also working on using this to help make the computers better at spotting artifacts in the future.)
So keep clicking, and remember, even your “artifact” clicks are useful.
New Sloan Digital Sky Survey Galaxies in Galaxy Zoo
The relaunch of Galaxy Zoo doesn’t only include the fantastic new images from the CANDELS survey on Hubble Space Telescope, but also includes over 200,000 new local galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We’ve had a lot of questions about where these galaxies came from and why they weren’t put into earlier versions of Galaxy Zoo, so I thought I’d write a bit about these new images.
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Project (SDSS) is currently in its 3rd phase (SDSS-III). You can read all about the history of SDSS here, and here, but briefly SDSS-I (2000-2005) and SDSS-II (2005-2008) took images of about a quarter of the sky (which we often refer to as the SDSS Legacy Imaging), and then measured redshifts for almost 1 million galaxies (the “Main Galaxy Sample”, which was the basis of the original Galaxy Zoo and Galaxy Zoo 2 samples; plus the “Luminous Red Galaxy” sample) as well as 120,000 much more distant quasars (very distant galaxies visible only as point source thanks to their actively accreting black holes).
Following the success of this project, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey decided they wanted to do more surveys, and put together a proposal which had four components (BOSS, SEGUE2, MARVELS and APOGEE – see here). To meet the science goals of these projects they realised they would need more sky area to be imaged. This proposal was funded as SDSS-III and started in 2008 (planned to run until 2014). The first thing this new phase of SDSS did was to take the new imaging. This was done using exactly the same telescope and camera (and methods) as the original SDSS imaging. They imaged an area of sky called the “Southern Galactic cap”. This is part of the sky which is visible from the Northern Hemisphere, but which is out the Southern side of our Galaxy’s disc. It totals about 40% of the size of the original SDSS area, brining the total imaging area up to about 1/3rd of the whole sky. The images in it were publicly released in January 2011 as part of the SDSS Data Release 8 (DR8 – so we sometimes call it the DR8 imaging area).
This illustration shows the wealth of information on scales both small and large available in the SDSS-III’s new image. The picture in the top left shows the SDSS-III view of a small part of the sky, centered on the galaxy Messier 33 (M33). The middle and right top pictures are further zoom-ins on M33.
The figure at the bottom is a map of the whole sky derived from the SDSS-III image. Visible in the map are the clusters and walls of galaxies that are the largest structures in the entire universe. Figure credit: M. Blanton and the SDSS-III collaboration
We have selected galaxies from this area which meet the criteria for being included in the original Galaxy Zoo 2 sample (for the experts – the brightest quarter of those which met Main Galaxy Sample criteria). Unfortunately in this part of the sky there is not systematic redshift survey of the local galaxies, so we will have to rely on other redshift surveys (the most complete being the 2MASS Redshift Survey) to get redshifts for as many of these galaxies as we can. We still think we’ll get a lot more galaxies and, be able to make large samples of really rare types of objects (like the red spiral or blue ellipticals). Another of our main science justifications for asking you to provide us with these morphologies was the potential for serendipitous discovery. Who knows what you might find in this part of the sky. The Violin Clef Galaxy is in the DR8 imaging area and featured heavily in our science team discussions of if this was a good idea or not.
And interesting things are already being found in just a week of clicks. The new Talk interface is a great additional place for us to discuss the interesting things that can be found in the sky.
For example this great system with tidal tails and a Voorwerpjie:
this weird triangular shaped configuration of satellites:
and an oldie (but a goodie) in the beautiful galaxy pair of NGC 3799 and NGC 3800 (NGC 3799 in the centre, NGC 3800 just off to the upper right):
and just this morning I discovered the discussion of this really unusual looking possible blue elliptical (IC 2540):
There are also rather more artifacts and odd stuff going on in these new images than I think we saw in the SDSS Legacy sample (from GZ1 and GZ2). Remember these are completely new images you are looking at. It really is true that no-one has looked at these in this level of detail (or perhaps ever) before. The original sample had a sanity check at some level, since when GZ1 ran the majority of the sample had already been targeted by SDSS for redshifts (so someone had to plug a fibre into a plate for each galaxy). In this new imaging all that has happened is that a computer algorithm was run to detect likely galaxies and set the scale of the image you see. Sometimes that mistakes stars, satellite trails, or parts of galaxies for galaxies. Always classify the central object in the image, and help us clean up this sample by using the star/artifact button.
And you can enjoy these odd images too. I like this collection of “GZ Pure Art” based on just odd things/artifacts classifier “echo-lily-mai” thought were pretty. 🙂 If you get confused by anything please join us on Talk, or the Forum where someone will help you identify what it is you’re seeing.
Tagging Galaxies in Talk
One of the cool features of the new Galaxy Zoo Talk is that you can tag objects using the # character. For example, if you see two overlapping galaxies like NGC 3314…
ESA Hubble Space Telescope has produced an incredibly detailed image of a pair of overlapping galaxies called NGC 3314. While the two galaxies look as if they are in the midst of a collision, this is in fact a trick of perspective: the two are in chance alignment from our vantage point (Credit: NASA).
… then you can tag it with #overlap when commenting on it. That way, anyone with an interest in overlapping galaxies can find it by just clicking on #overlap. There’s already a discussion on tags on Talk, but if you find something that needs tagging, you can always start your own. Just use the # character!
Galaxy Zoo 