Zooniverse

Abstract:

In order to understand the formation and subsequent evolution of galaxies one must first distinguish between the two main morphological classes of massive systems: spirals and early-type systems. This paper introduces a project, Galaxy Zoo, which provides visual morphological classifications for nearly one million galaxies, extracted from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). This achievement was made possible by inviting the general public to visually inspect and classify these galaxies via the internet. The project has obtained more than 40,000,000 individual classifications made by ~100,000 participants. We discuss the motivation and strategy for this project, and detail how the classifications were performed and processed. We find that Galaxy Zoo results are consistent with those for subsets of SDSS galaxies classified by professional astronomers, thus demonstrating that our data provides a robust morphological catalogue. Obtaining morphologies by direct visual inspection avoids introducing biases associated with proxies for morphology such as colour, concentration or structual parameters. In addition, this catalogue can be used to directly compare SDSS morphologies with older data sets. The colour--magnitude diagrams for each morphological class are shown, and we illustrate how these distributions differ from those inferred using colour alone as a proxy for morphology.

Abstract:

We re-examine the evidence for a violation of large-scale statistical isotropy in the distribution of projected spin vectors of spiral galaxies. We have a sample of $\sim 37,000$ spiral galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, with their line of sight spin direction confidently classified by members of the public through the online project Galaxy Zoo. After establishing and correcting for a certain level of bias in our handedness results we find the winding sense of the galaxies to be consistent with statistical isotropy. In particular we find no significant dipole signal, and thus no evidence for overall preferred handedness of the Universe. We compare this result to those of other authors and conclude that these may also be affected and explained by a bias effect.

Abstract:

In order to understand the formation and subsequent evolution of galaxies one must first distinguish between the two main morphological classes of massive systems: spirals and early-type systems. This paper introduces a project, Galaxy Zoo, which provides visual morphological classifications for nearly one million galaxies, extracted from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). This achievement was made possible by inviting the general public to visually inspect and classify these galaxies via the internet. The project has obtained more than 4 × 107 individual classifications made by ∼10 5 participants. We discuss the motivation and strategy for this project, and detail how the classifications were performed and processed. We find that Galaxy Zoo results are consistent with those for subsets of SDSS galaxies classified by professional astronomers, thus demonstrating that our data provide a robust morphological catalogue. Obtaining morphologies by direct visual inspection avoids introducing biases associated with proxies for morphology such as colour, concentration or structural parameters. In addition, this catalogue can be used to directly compare SDSS morphologies with older data sets. The colour-magnitude diagrams for each morphological class are shown, and we illustrate how these distributions differ from those inferred using colour alone as a proxy for morphology. © 2008 RAS.

Abstract:

We present spatially-resolved, rest-frame optical spectroscopy of a Lyman-break galaxy (LBG), Q0347-383 C5, obtained with SINFONI on the VLT. This galaxy, among the % brightest LBGs, is only the second LBG observed with an integral-field spectrograph. It was first described by Pettini et al. (2001, ApJ, 554, 981), who obtained WFPC2 F702W imaging and longslit spectroscopy in the -band. We find that the emission line morphology is dominated by two unresolved blobs at a projected distance of 5 kpc with a velocity offset of km s. Velocity dispersions suggest that each blob has a mass of. Unlike Pettini et al. (2001), our spectra are deep enough to detect H, and we derive star-formation rates of yr, and use the H/[OIII] ratio to crudely estimate an oxygen abundance , which is in the range typically observed for LBGs. We compare the properties of Q0347-383 C5 with what is found for other LBGs, including the gravitationally lensed "arc+core" galaxy (Nesvadba et al. 2006, ApJ, 650, 661), and discuss possible scenarios for the nature of the source, namely disk rotation, a starburst-driven wind, disk fragmentation, and merging of two LBGs. We favor the merging interpretation for bright, extended LBGs like Q0347-383 C5, in broad agreement with predicted merger rates from hierarchical models. © 2008 ESO.