Lecture Liveblog: Galaxy Zoo science meeting
Seven of the Galaxy Zoo team are gathered in Portsmouth today for our first science meeting. The plan is to go through all of the hard work we’ve been doing to analyise the results and see what we agree on - and what we don’t. Sadly we can’t invite the more than 100,000 people who have contributed to the meeting, but we’ll try to keep you up to date here. I’ve turned off comment moderation, so feel free to join in.
10.07 : Typical organised start to a meeting; currently everyone is running around trying to connect their laptops to the internet while Steven is downstairs printing draft copies of the papers and Edd is making coffee for us visitors. Personally, three donuts have been consumed so I’m waking up. More soon.
10.18 : Starting 18 minutes late is probably a record. Bob has just announced he’s paying for lunch.
10.57 : I’ve just presented my paper, which will be an introduction to the project. The bottom line is that there are many different ways to go from clicks on a website to a final catalogue, and that understanding the biases in each is difficult. In particular, the fraction of galaxies which are classified as elliptical is very sensitive to what decisions we make. However, if we require a high level of agreement we get results that agree with other professional data. Other people can then use the results to do interesting science - over to Steven.
11.07 : Steven’s job has been to work out where ellipticals and spirals live. We know that you’re more likely to find ellipticals in the heart of clusters, but quantifying that in the nearby Universe is hard because you have to look across large regions of sky, which is exactly what Sloan and hence Galaxy Zoo does.
11.18 : …it turns out that comparing to high redshift results is difficult. If I’m understanding the discussion correctly, the problem is defining how dense an environment actually is. Is it enough to count how many neighbours, or do we need to something more complicated?
11:42 : If you take the data at face value, the fraction of galaxies which are classified as elliptical changes rapidly with redshift (distance). This isn’t true if you only look at the brightest galaxies, suggesting it’s just the tendency of people to see faint fuzzy things as elliptical. However, Steven can account for this by correcting to match the results from the closest galaxies of a particular brightness.
12.15 : We’ve moved on from talking about the main population of galaxies to the weird and wonderful. Kevin has been collecting the bluest ellipticals in the sample; remember this was one of the main points of Galaxy Zoo. Most elliptical galaxies formed their stars in the early Universe and are now ‘red and dead’. Elliptical galaxies which are blue might be late developers, allowing us to see stars forming in elliptical galaxies today.
12:39 : Yey, we find lots of blue ellipticals. Many more than anyone else has, and lots of them are pretty close (so we can be sure that we’re not confusing faint fuzzy spirals with ellipticals again). We immediately plunge into an argument as to what these strange objects actually are.
12.45 : I may be becoming flippant (blood sugar from donuts is all but gone) but I think we agree we don’t know what these are, and that that’s what we’re excited about. Bob’s talking next but has run away.
12.47 : He’s back, but we’re back to arguing about what these blue ellipticals are, particularly about how to compare to computer simulations. Bob’ll be talking about our other set of weird galaxies - red spirals.
12.57 : Bob’s now standing up, and we’re still arguing about what the blue ellipticals are. It’s his own fault, though. OK, he’s now moved on.
13.04 : Here there’s more confusion - distinguishing between true spirals, and galaxies which have no spiral arms but do have a disc - is all important. Not all of them can be explained away by this, though.
13.11 : Off to lunch to argue about those results. Back about 2.
14.14 : Back from lunch, and just setting up conference calls to other team members who couldn’t be in Portsmouth today. - Edd
14.18 : One of the other interesting parts to the Zoo is the social science side - looking at the users rather than the galaxies, user demographics, motivations and so on. Jordan’s giving us a rundown. - Edd
14.37 : Jordan’s telling us his plans for surveys of users. It’s not only sounding interesting, but also useful in keeping the Zoo something everyone enjoys using. - Edd
14.43 : And moving on to talk about our plans for the next phase of Galaxy Zoo - Edd
As a who’s who - the last pic, Chris has is back to you all, with Kate on the left. Then it’s Kevin, Daniel and me on the far right. The middle one’s from the other side, and you can see Steven at the back on the left. Bob’s not pictured - he’s the man with the camera. - Edd
15.25 : And Kate is now telling us about the mysteries of spiral handedness… - Edd
16:25 : Which caused a huge argument - all good fun. Some of us have to head home, others to the pub. Thanks for joining us. Chris
on November 27th, 2007 at 11:12 am
Good morning everybody! I hope it’s going well, I wish I could be there.
on November 27th, 2007 at 12:16 pm
Thanks for taking the time and trouble to keep us up with what is going on ..
.. if time permits.. I have a thread in the forum on classifications. Those in the thread were hoping for some thoughts on that topic from the Zookeepers..
on November 27th, 2007 at 12:27 pm
I doubt we’ll get back to you today, but we’ll make sure we do in the next few days. We’re already running about an hour behind!
on November 27th, 2007 at 12:35 pm
So who cares about time management in the cause of science! This really made my morning - thanks to all, and Chris, don’t burst from all those doughnuts, we’d miss you too much. (Edd and Steven, AKA bamford, you sound like excellent hosts.) I can’t wait to hear more.
on November 27th, 2007 at 12:45 pm
It’s got to be hard to pay attention to what’s going on (the fun part) and try to summarize it for us. Understand there is ’scheduled work’ to be done in the short time you all are together - just wanted to put a plug in, if there was time..
on November 27th, 2007 at 1:11 pm
Thanks for putting this on the blog, great stuff.
Are you sure the doughnuts are for eating and not props for the ring galaxy discussion!
on November 27th, 2007 at 1:29 pm
Very interesting - and some items a bit puzzling, which is the start of many good things in our field. From the backlit front - got a scheduling query from the WIYN telescope management last week, which may mean nothing or may be a hopeful sign. Talking with a colleague at STScI last week, we realized that the existing sample and maybe SDSS images alone can give a fairly quick as well as interesting result on z-distributions of dust in edge-on galaxies, since star-forming spirals manage to churn significant amounts of dust a kpc or more up that way. Also found out that various folks incliding the Hubble Heritage planners are looking for spectacular merging/interacting systems that haven’t yet been done to death, as targets for the WFC3 early-release observations, and pointed them to the Forum trainwreck thread… (Just thought I’d mention all thios while most of you are together)
on November 27th, 2007 at 3:03 pm
Oh dear! I am confused (a not uncommon state!) If ellipticals can be formed from mergers and these events trigger major star formation, wouldn’t recent collisons produce blue ellipticals? or are collisions relatively rare in the present day.
Robin
on November 27th, 2007 at 3:30 pm
While the Zookeepers are busy, a quick followup to Robin - in short, yes. Spiral/spiral merger remnants will be blue, fading and reddening as they age. Elliptical/elliptical mergers (which have gotten the name “dry mergers”) don’t do this, since they don’t make starbursts. The very consistent colors of most ellipticals tell you that most of such mergers must have happened in the early Universe (whether in single or multiple steps of mergers is left to be determined…). On top of this, there is reasonable evidence (for example from the statistics of galaxy pairing in HST images) that the rate of interactions and mergers has been declining with cosmic time, so we do expect to see fewer such events now than there once were. This all connects with the frequency of local mergers and blue elliptical galaxies, among other things.
on November 27th, 2007 at 4:37 pm
Thanks for the posts.. and tip one for me.. ’tis a little early for me over here..
on November 27th, 2007 at 7:22 pm
Judging by the middle photo, it’s obvious that Leonardo da Vinci was there too - or was this one taken with a mirror? (You can right-click on the photo and open it in a new window to see what they’ve done to their Powerpoint presentation!!)
And Infinity, custard and jam doughnuts are presumably as props for normal galaxies with red or yellow cores, but in that case what about chocolate ones?
Fascinating stuff folks. I can’t wait to hear more about where galaxies are, blue ellipticals, red spirals, ordinary ellipticals, various bias and your plans for the us Galaxyzooitis sufferers in future. Thanks for putting in all these posts for the multitudes!
on November 27th, 2007 at 8:49 pm
At lunch, as I was filling my dear patient wife in on what was happening at the science meeting, she interrupted me to ask:
“Did they get tea and scones for break?”
Then dared me to post the question… she should know me better by now..
Thanks again for the blog…
on November 27th, 2007 at 10:14 pm
No time for a break today, sadly; very good lunch (thanks Bob), though. As for the backwards picture, god only knows what Bob was up to with the camera while the rest of us were in earnest discussion. I should also explain that we were on skype with members of the team based in the US and Northern Ireland during the time these pictures were taken, so that’s why we’re all looking in slightly odd directions.
on November 28th, 2007 at 12:21 am
Just back from an all day meeting - sadly not yours - so only just caught up. Have to say that the sharing of the GZ results is very much appreciated. I’ve been a lifelong (very) amateur astronomer so to be involved in cutting edge research is an honour and to be allowed to eavesdrop on a discussion of the results is amazing.
I have learnt lots from the knowledgeable people who contribute to the Zoo but after seeing the pictures of your meeting I have just one question:
It’s nice to put faces to names but why are you all so damned YOUNG?? Where have all the middle aged astronomers gone?
I need to know my fate. ;0)
on November 28th, 2007 at 10:47 am
We’re so young because this project has been run for free by a bunch of us in our spare time; older astronomers are too busy/distracted/sane.
on November 28th, 2007 at 12:30 pm
So what did Kate tell you about the handedness of spirals, how much of a difference are we seeing?
on November 28th, 2007 at 5:15 pm
This is cool! Thanks guys!
on November 29th, 2007 at 10:02 am
Young people are the future for us… poor old guys. ; )
Ciao e grazie per quello che fate!
Greetings from Italy.
M.
on December 3rd, 2007 at 1:33 pm
hi, do you ever have any meetings near kensington in London. It would be nice to attend as i am very interested in astrononmy but dont know how to begin or where to start.
on December 3rd, 2007 at 5:37 pm
It’s true I’m often thinking about faint galaxy if it’s actually an elliptical one when I think I can perceive kind of more faint object who could be arms of a spiral .In this case I classify it as elliptical when this impression refered only to one side of this object , but am I correct, in doing so ? Ellipticals being older than spiral, it’s not fair to act like that and making such a mistake in the classification can hide an important fact ,am I true or am I missing something ?
on December 3rd, 2007 at 6:06 pm
Andre,
At the risk of highjacking Chris’ blog to answer your question - you might be interested in European Astrofest 2008. Have a look at these links:
http://www.astronomynow.com/astrofest/
http://www.galaxyzooforum.org/index.php?topic=7991.0
You’ll meet lots of people who’ll be happy to talk astronomy!
on December 4th, 2007 at 5:53 pm
Who is The Great Universe Driver Provider Institute of Tech-nol-o-gy?
Who is The Milky-way Galaxy Driver?
Who is The Earth or World Driver?
[May be the center of the great universe is a driver, is it or not?, please verify?].
[Or another answer(s)].
2008[The Time Machine: 1st Draft Analysis will be Launch].
on December 5th, 2007 at 12:06 pm
I have been down loading all the most interesting galaxys - read most beautiful, and playing them back in a slide show for myself.
In my humble opinion they seem to show the change from elliptical to spiral or round to extremely flat gallaxy. Like the gallaxys start as relatively stationary and slowly start spinning, till they form a plane and start discarding there extremities.
on December 5th, 2007 at 10:27 pm
Just keep us all well informed and we will do our best.