May 2012
15 posts
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New paper on the Galaxy Zoo bars accepted to MNRAS →
I’m delighted to announce that the latest paper based on Galaxy Zoo classifications was accepted to appear in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society earlier this week, and appears on the arxiv this morning (link will be here when I have it).
Usually there is a long delay between submission and acceptance of papers (something Kevin discussed on this blog in “What Happens Next – Peer...
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Transit of Venus: Live →
In June 2012 people all over the world will watch the planet Venus transit across the Sun. Planet Hunters is all about spotting planets as they move across the face of a star so we thought it would be good to share the event with everyone. Venus will pass directly between the Earth and Sun on the night of June 5th and the morning of June 6th. This historic event can be seen from many parts of the...
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Curiouser and curiouser – Hubble and Mkn 1498 →
Fresh off the telescope, here’s a first view of the “Voorwerpje” gas clouds around the Seyfert galaxy Markarian 1498. Its nucleus, shown in our Lick and Kitt Peak spectra, is a type 1 Seyfert, meaning that we see the broad-line region of gas very close to the central black hole, moving at high velocity. Those data showed highly-ionized gas to a radius of at least 20 kiloparsecs (65,000...
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Awesome People: More from ZooCon1 →
Today we have a guest post by Jules, fellow Planet Hunter and zooite who attended the ZooCon1. Jules is a lead moderator and blogger for the Solar Stormwatch and Moon Zoo forums as well as a volunteer on the Zooniverse Advisory Board.
Just back from the very first #zoocon1 in Chicago. I attended as a volunteer on the Zooniverse Advisory Board. As Meg said it was a chance for the science teams...
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Into the lake of death! →
The ‘Lake of Death’ (Lacus Mortis) lies in the northeastern part of the Moon, north of Mare Serenitatis, and is either an ancient crater or a basin, which has been flooded by lava. It is about 150 km in diameter with the crater Burg, which was formed less than a million years ago, situated approximately in the centre. Lacus Mortis was named by selenographer Giovanni Riccioli in 1651 but he...
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Ejecta Blocking Boulders →
All credit for this entry goes to forum regular kodemunkey who wrote this article:
Hello, and welcome to what will hopefully be the first of many IOTW posts from me.
I was exploring the LRO Data using the WMS Browser and I came across Maginus crater.
(Maginus crater, as seen in the WMS browser, latitude -48.992774 longitude -5.149416)
This is what Wikipedia has to say about the...
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My Galaxies – Write in Starlight →
Long time Zookeeper Steven Bamford has made a new website on which you can easilly write any words you like from the galaxy alphabet.He’s called the website: My Galaxies – Write in Starlight!
Enjoy!
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Update on Dwarf Novae →
Today we have a guest post by fellow Planet Hunter Daryll (nighthawk_black) updating us on the search for dwarf novae and cataclysmic variables. Daryll’s here to talk about a dwarf nova candidate found in PH Talk.
Hi Planet Hunters,
Following the guest post from GO Director Martin Still, a review of light some light curves discussed on PH Talk turned up an interesting target somewhat similar to...
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The Most Distant Bubble? →
A little while ago Sarah Fitzmaurice, a work experience student at Zooniverse Oxford, spent a week working with the Milky Way Project database. She did some fun things with the data, including plotting the locations of many of the bubbles according to their distance from us. For many, the current canonical view of our own Galaxy comes from a combination of data sources, compiled by Robert Hurt,...
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Zooniverse Science Conference →
Image credit: Michael Parrish
Greetings from Adler Planetarium in Chicago. I’m at the first Zooniverse Science Conference. I’m here representing the Planet Hunters science team. At this conference science teams from the current and upcoming Zooniverse projects and the Zooniverse development team have gathered together to talk citizen science. It’s been a great two days of presented talks and...
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My favourite colour magnitude diagram →
I was embarrassed to discover today that I never got around to writing a full blog post explaining our work studying the properties of the red spirals, as I promised way back in October 2009. Chris wrote a lovely post about it “Red Spirals at Night, Astronomers Delight“, and in my defense new science results from Zoo2, and a few other small (tiny people) things distracted me.
I won’t go back to...
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1 million pages →
The 15th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica runs to 32 large volumes, each of about 1000 pages. The million pages of logs we’ve transcribed would take up more than 30 times as much space on the shelf.
Today oldWeather has passed another remarkable milestone: we’ve now transcribed 1 million logbook pages. 1,000,000 or 106 – however you write it, that’s a big number.
The logbooks have large...
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Lens Zoo is Coming! →
We’re very pleased to tell you that we’ve been awarded developer time from the Citizen Science Alliance to build a new, exciting Zooniverse project to discover gravitational lenses.
What’s a gravitational lens, you might ask? When a massive galaxy or cluster of galaxies lies right in front of a more distant galaxy, the light from the background source gets deflected and focused towards us. These...
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A first Hubble look at UGC 7342 →
Overnight, Hubble got our first data on perhaps the most spectacular Voorwerpje host galaxy, the merging system UGC 7342. We have to wait until almost the end of the year for what we really wanted to see, the ionized gas. The telescope has particular time pressure in some parts of the sky (as if it doesn’t have extreme time pressure on everything people want to do with it), so we split the two...
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Beautiful galaxy Messier 106 →
Inspired by today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day Image, here’s a quick post about the beautiful nearby spiral galaxy, Messier 106 (or NGC 4258).
M106 Close Up (from APOD) Credit: Composite Image Data - Hubble Legacy Archive; Adrian Zsilavec, Michelle Qualls, Adam Block / NOAO / AURA / NSF Processing - André van der Hoeven
This is a composite Hubble Space Telescope and ground based (from NOAO)...
April 2012
12 posts
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Searching for Earthlike Worlds →
Today’s post is a guest post by Tony Hoffman. He’s a fellow Planet Hunter and is also one of our Planet Hunters Talk moderators. Today he’s writing about the public talk Planet Hunters PI Debra Fischer gave at the Amateur Astronomers Association of New York.
On March 30, Planet Hunters’ own Debra Fischer, professor of astronomy at Yale University, gave a talk on “Searching for Earthlike...
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Notched Cavities or INA-like? →
User placidstorm posted some Ina-like formations in the Dark Halo Craters thread in December 2011.
I think these look more like “notched cavities” than INA-like formations – see end of posting for references to these features.
These cavities appear to be associated with lava which covers a lava tube or rille, part of which later collapses leaving depressions. I don’t know if that’s what has...
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Exploring the MWP: Coordinates and SIMBAD →
One of the most common questions posted on Milky Way Talk is “What is [that thing] in this image?”, and science team members try to respond to some of those where we can. The galactic plane is so incredibly rich at these infrared wavelengths and the Galaxy is so vast that even with the combined experience of the whole science team we usually don’t know the answer.
To help everyone out, we’ve...
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Kitt Peak wrapup – for now →
The end of this observing run made up for the unnecessarily interesting variety of weather early on. Calm, clear skies, ran through an object list just as fast as we said in the proposal. Here’s a montage of the red-light images from 9 of the target galaxy pairs done on night 4.
That’s it for this run. But we’ll be back there late next month to really clean up the target list.
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A bright bubble around a dying star →
The bright bubble around Luminous Blue Variable star G24.73+0.69
A few days ago Milky Way Project user suelaine posted an image of this pretty bubble on the Talk forum, asking whether it was a supernova. As supernovae – or rather, the debris that’s left behind after they explode – often have this kind of shape, I initially thought she was right. But when I looked up the coordinates on SIMBAD –...
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Night 2 at Kitt Peak – watching out or blown away? →
The forecast for tonight’s continued imaging of Galaxy Zoo overlapping galaxies was marginal, with a storm expected. That has not yet materalizd, ut the wind have been so high that, after the anemometer flirted with the 72-km/hour safety limit for two hours after sunset, I finally had to shut down a little whole ago. There are data on two pairs so far tonight, and I’ll naturally keep one eye on...
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Observing updates – live from Kitt Peak, April... →
(0220 UT) All set up to start work. Worrying clouds have at least temporarily receded. While being checked out by a staff member to make sure I won’t break things, I’ve checked the telescope pointing on a couple of bright stars (Castor and Pollux, in fact) and am just waiting another few minutes for it to get dark enough to critically focus the CCD camera and TV acquisition system. Then off, for...
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Dusty dwarfs from Arizona →
How is the latest set of telescopic followups to a Galaxy Zoo project like the aftermath when Moria was delved? One has dwarfs and one had dwarves, and both were dusty. (Look, if you think that’s nerdy, I could have made a reference to First Age history).
Incoming data! This week I’m headed up to the 2.1m telescope of Kitt Peak National Observatory for more followup images of overlapping...
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New Dataset from Galaxy Zoo! →
We’ve posted a new data set here: http://bit.ly/HCHu7Y
This sample is presented in the Galaxy Zoo 1 paper on AGN host galaxies (Schawinski et al., 2010, ApJ, 711, 284). It is a volume-limited sample of galaxies (0.02 < z < 0.05, M_z < -19.5 AB) with emission line classifications, stellar masses, velocity dispersions and GZ1 morphological classifications. When using this sample, please...
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Dwarf Novae →
We have a guest post from Martin Still. Martin is Deputy Science Team Lead and Guest Observer Office Director for Kepler. He’s writing today to tell you about an interesting class of objects you might encounter when classifying Kepler light curves
Dwarf novae are binary stars consisting of a white dwarf and main sequence companion. The binary orbit of period a few hours is small enough that the...
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Kepler Gets an Extended Mission →
The NASA Senior Review panel decisions are in. The panel assessed Kepler and several other astrophysics missions including Hubble Space Telescope, Chandra X-ray Observatory, Spitzer Space Telescope, XMM-Newton, Swift, Planck, Fermi Gamma Ray Telescope,and Suzaku. This is to evaluate the missions and decide if they should be renewed or approved for an extended mission. For Kepler, having launched...
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Strange Whites →
Forum member Ewan, otherwise known as Dynamo Duck, found some strange looking craters on the South-East edge of Mare Crisium. They appear to have unusually high albedo floors and possibly some ejecta of the same high albedo material.
Searching around the area I found some more of these “strange whites.”
Here are two.
And closer…
And then they were everywhere.
At the moment they remain a...
March 2012
14 posts
2 tags
Direct Imaging of Planets →
HR8799 direct imaging planet detections Credit: Marois et al (2010)
Today we have a guest blog from Sasha Hinkley talking about a different way of detecting exoplanets than the transit method we use at Planet Hunters. Sasha is a Sagan Postdoctoral Fellow at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, CA. Sasha received his PhD from Columbia University in New York City and has been...
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Triggered Star Formation →
There’s a new Milky Way Project paper out on the arXiv. It was submitted to the Astrophysical Journal last week and concerns the topic of the triggered formation of massive stars. This study was lead by Sarah Kendrew and utilises the results of the first MWP paper (our catalogue of bubbles).
One of the main reasons for undertaking the MWP was to produce a large bubble catalogue that would allow...
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Visualizing FITS Images In Browser →
In the next week we will deploy the first of a slew of tools for Galaxy Zoo. This tool is dubbed the “Multi-wavelength Viewer” (please suggest names if you have something clever). Though the current iteration of Galaxy Zoo is called “Galaxy Zoo: Hubble”, there still exists quite a few galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), 51861 galaxies to be exact. We are processing these data to...
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The Finale of Merger Zoo →
Working toward Fitness
Over the last year, we have been pretty quiet at the Merger Wars site. However, we have been extremely busy analyzing the data that you have created. So far, the Merger’s Applet has been used to view over 3 million simulations of interacting galaxies. We have estimated it actually simulated more than 100 million other systems that weren’t viewed by our users.
Of...
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Storms, data-analysis and fruitcake →
Thanks to everyone who helped track the most recent bunch of solar storms. Several of them came by Earth but their magnetic fields were mostly the same polarity as Earth’s and when this happens, just like in the school experiment, the two magnetic fields just bounce off each other. I was amazed that we could track an Earth-directed storm at all from where the spacecraft are now, particularly with...
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Hadley Rille →
Continuing the rille theme from last week, Hadley Rille has been a bit of a forum feature this week. Forum regular kodemunkey sent me a interesting couple of NAC (Narrow Angle Camera) images he had come across while exploring a “wandering rille”. Here they are:
M104504818LE
..
M144612571RE
He thought he might have spotted a volcanic vent but wasn’t sure. This turned out to be the start of...
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Galaxy Zoo in this week’s Guardian →
Just a quick note to let you know that there’s a very nice story about Galaxy Zoo, it’s beginnings and citizen science in general in the Guardian: http://bit.ly/zmdaWx
It features, amongst others, our very own Alice (@penguingalaxy) and Hanny (@hannyvanarkel). For more late-breaking Galaxy Zoo news, why not follow us on Twitter (@galaxyzoo)?
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New Features Coming to Galaxy Zoo →
Dear Galaxy Zoo Community,
It’s about time to introduce myself. My name is Amit, and I joined the Zooniverse development team last fall at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. Our development group has grown, which means we have exciting new Zooniverse projects in the pipeline, but we also have new features coming to Galaxy Zoo in the near future.
We’ve been working hard to define various tools...
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KBO Catalogue Getting Submitted this week →
The catalogue of KBOs discovered within IceHunters will be submitted this week. We just emailed everyone we could who contributed to a discovery to ask you to please check your name. Please check your mail! Have questions? Think you should have gotten an email and didn’t? Click over to the forums and let us know and join the discussion.
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An excellent series of new logbooks →
You’ve probably noticed that we’ve published another instalment in the ongoing series of Royal Navy logbooks on oldWeather. For those keeping count, this is batch four of oldWeather phase two, and the unifying theme of this group of books is that the ships travel far from home indeed – these are voyages that include operations in the Pacific.
There’s the usual range of ships to choose from, from...
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New Planet Hunters Co-discoveries →
When I posted with news of our second paper’s submission last week I mentioned that the new paper from the Kepler team included a section on Planet Hunters.
The section (7.4, since you’re asking) is fabulous, mentioning the ‘remarkable enthusiasm’ of Planet Hunters volunteers, who are not only have the ‘opportunity to experience the scientific method but also the possibility of experiencing the...
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Milky Way Project Refresh →
We’re excited to announce that we have updated the Milky Way Project to show you more bubbles and to produce even more science! After creating our catalogue of 5,106 bubbles earlier this year, we’re aiming to try and refine and improve our measurements of the MWP Bubble catalogue by asking you to measure each and every bubble in greater detail. This means that for a while we’ll no longer be...
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Analysis of the oldWeather data →
Now that we’ve completed the original batch of logs we were working on in oldWeather, we’ve started to release the new weather observations recovered for us in scientific investigations. Leading the way in such investigations is Ed Hawkins of the University of Reading, who’s started a series of posts on his blog describing the value of oldWeather for the study of Arctic climate and sea-ice, the...
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Multiplanets and the New Kepler Planet Candidate... →
It’s been a very busy few weeks for the Planet Hunters science team. Chris submitted his paper and posted online announcing the discovery of two more planet candidates. In addition, I submitted (finally!!) my paper detailing the results of the Q1 classifications looking for short period planets and how well we do at finding transits from planets 2 earth radii and larger. So stay tuned , more on...
February 2012
10 posts
2 tags
2nd Planet Hunters Paper Submitted →
Way back in January I blogged about our announcement of two new candidates, confidently predicting that the paper would be out in the next few days. That didn’t happen for all sorts of reasons, but it’s now submitted to the Astronomical Journal. Rather than wait until we get the referee’s seal of approval (or a lot of criticism!), we’ve made the paper public via the arXiv – you can read it here.
...
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Schiller Crater →
The Image of the Week for 20th February 2012 featured exploding boulders, discovered by Dr Anthony Cook, in Schiller crater which is located in the southwestern region of the Moon, south of Oceanus Procellarum at coordinates 51.8 S / 40.0 W. This crater is interesting in its own right apart from the exploding boulders!
Schiller crater is one of the most uniquely shaped craters on the...
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Hubble results on Hanny’s Voorwerp – the whole... →
We just submitted the journal paper describing the Hubble results on Hanny’s Voorwerp, to the Astronomical Journal. It’s not on arxiv.org yet – you can get a PDF here. Here’s a “brief” summary.
Data: In this paper we look at a whole collection of new data, obtained since the original discovery paper. These include:
Hubble, of course:
- WFC3 (Wide-Field camera 3) images in the near-ultraviolet,...
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Exploding Boulders! →
We are used to seeing boulder tracks on Moon Zoo and often come across (or actively go hunting for!) the boulder that caused them. Usually we find something like these large intact boulders having come to rest at the end of their tracks.
highlighted by placidstorm and kodemunkey
Moon Zoo team member Dr Anthony Cook recently sent me this picture of two boulder tracks in Schiller crater:
...
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Star-formation, AGN and Ultra-luminous infrared... →
An update on mergers from Alfredo:
Star-formation, AGN and Ultra-luminous infrared galaxies (ULIRGs)
Looking at our galaxies in the infrared allows us to discover the overall star-formation rate of the system. Yet if we are interested in the fine details of what really fuel the energetic output of our mergers we need to have a closer look to the light we get from them.
Using a emission lines...
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Volunteers Needed to Finish Q1 Round 2 →
I’m close to submitting my paper looking for short period planets in the Quarter 1 Kepler light curves and comparing to the known Kepler sample of planets. For the past several months I’ve been developing an algorithm to combine the results from multiple users who have classified the Quarter 1 light curves and summarizing the results in a paper. The goal was to look for planets with period less...
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So What’s Next…. →
Hi,
I wanted to give an update. We’ve had such an amazing response to our participation with BBC Stargazing, with over 1 million classifications completed before the start of the third broadcast. We’ve been truly swamped with classifications to search through (and that’s a good thing!). So what do we do with those 1,084,760+ classifications? What’s next?
Well, we need to look for candidates....
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A new void in the melt? →
One of the many types of features we are looking out for on Moon Zoo are the Lava tube skylights – ceiling collapses in lava tubes in regions which have been subjected to lunar volcanism.
Marius Hills Lava Tube Sky Light –65 metres wide
~
Mare Ingenii Tube Sky Light –130 metres wide
These pits or caves would provide ready made shelters for any future manned missions. There’s more information in...
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Another Galactic Twin →
It seems that finding our Milky Way’s twin has become a bit of an industry these days.
NASA/ESA have got in on the act today, releasing a press release about their favourite twin of the Milky Way, NGC 1073 and the below absolutely gorgeous Hubble Space Telescope image they’ve taken of it: Classic Portrait of a Barred Spiral.
Hubble image of NGC 1073: another possible Milky Way twin. Credit:...
