Did I forget to tell you that the latest Living Space was online? And that it contains a fantastic preview of the Phoenix mission to Mars?
Sorry for the delay, but you can still listen to it or download it to save it for ever.
The link from the main site should be up shortly, but the Galaxy Zoo Forum is now open for business.
(You’ll also shortly be able to revisit galaxies classified in the last week).
Did you know that composer Camille Saint Saens was an astronomer? Neither did I until I heard Steven Isserlis talking about him before a fantastic performance of the 1st cello concerto at the Proms this week. You can listen again to the concert here, but only until Saturday.
This week’s Carnival of Space is up, and it’s a particularly good one so if Galaxy Zoo hasn’t eaten your time then head over there now.
Can it really be a week? The launch of Galaxy Zoo will live long in the memory for sheer strangeness as the sudden realisation that what for a while has seemed like a crazy idea was actually going to work.
Let me back up a bit. Some of the work I’ve been doing here in Oxford is based on a sample of 50,000 galaxies which were classified by eye by, among others, Kevin Schawinski. Actually, he’d badgered me (rather rudely, I thought at the time!) in the talk I gave during my interview about the pointlessness of making the selection any other way. Once I got here, we were talking one day and one of us said wistfully that it would be nice to do the other 950,000 and complete the job properly, and then it hit us that this might actually be possible.
That was, I think, late February, and since then we’d been working pretty steadily toward a launch that was always a few weeks away. 10 days or so ago we heard that the BBC might be interested, and so it was that last Tuesday morning I found myself with Kevin and Kate Land at Science Oxford along with a TV crew and some surprisingly enthusiastic sixth formers from a local school who we’d roped in. The filming went well, but there were other science stories around, most notably a story about how scientists were right about global warming (well, duh!), and I was quietly pessemistic. The press release went out, and we waited.
At 6.45am last Wednesday, I was ushered into a small room in a building on Millbank, just down from the Houses of Parliament. Sitting there - desperately preparing for an interview with the Prime Minister - was John Humphrys. Being able to see the person interviewing me was hugely helpful, and almost overcame the nerves of being in front of one of the most famously intimidating interviewers in the country. At the end, clutching a styrofoam cup of BBC coffee on the quiet street outside, I thought I’d done a reasonable job. Around this time news of Galaxy Zoo appeared on the BBC news website and then all hell broke loose.
Despite the presence of stories like the fourth on the list above, we remained in the ‘most emailed’ list for most of the day, and the computer generating images just couldn’t cope with the traffic. We spent the rest of the day personally answering complaints that the site wasn’t working, explaining that we were working on it and that all would be well soon. In a classic demonstration of the law of unintended consequences, changing the site so that images were available faster led to a dramatic increase in web traffic. Our server had survived multiple sloan press frenzies, and all the data releases from that project but Galaxy Zoo well and truly broke it. Jan, ourtself-proclaimed ringmaster (Do zoos have rings? Hmm…) has worked very, very hard and it wasn’t his fault, but even he signed his email ‘Whew!’. At this point I started giggling to myself.
More emails to answer, half of them while sitting through the announcement of the most distant galaxies yet seen (wifi in lecture theatres is A Good Thing).
By the time I went to bed that night, everything was fixed and the classifications were flooding in, along with email after email with beautiful and amazing sights. This is one of my recent favourites, from claire:
Ever since, the emails (sorry if we haven’t responded to yours yet - we will) and the classifications have just kept flooding in. All our casual plans to sit down after a couple of days to see how things are going were thrown out the window, and we’ve been left desperately running to keep up. It seemed that everyone out there wanted to be part of this - to explore the Universe and to help science - or just wanted to see pretty pictures. There was also a fairly constant stream of questions about particular objects which we will get too. I’m only half joking when I’ve been telling the team we’re going to set up a website to invite the public to answer the queries sent in. We’ll call it Email Zoo.
Seriously, I’ve been inspired by just what it’s possible to do with this internet thing, and we have lots of ideas for new exhibits and attractions for the Zoo, in order to make use of our more than 50,000 research assistants. One idea might be to do freeform classification - which galaxy does this one most look like? - and see if the old catagories of spirals and ellipticals are actually any good. We’re also looking for different data sets to let you loose on, and so we’re a long way from done right now. I can’t wait for next week at the Zoo. Thanks for all your help, and thanks to the Team
Hi
I’ll post a proper update about Galaxy Zooand more amazing images later, but I wanted to respond to those of you clamouring for extra buttons. For now, the task is to get a sense of how the galaxies fit into these two major classifications. They’re used almost routinely in the literature as shorthand for two groups of galaxies whose properties are different; ‘old, large’ ellipticals and ‘young dynamic’ spirals. What we don’t know is what the properties of these two large groups of galaxies are IF you do that selection properly, by eye - and we’re now very close to finding out thanks to your hard, hard work. Now, you don’t have to spend more than two minutes in the Zoo to realise that these are very diffuse groups. At times, it’s like splitting animals into vertebrate or invertibrate and trying to draw conclusions from that. Actually, that’s a pretty good analogy because that’s the stage we’ve got to - we don’t yet have enough detail to make finer divisions which are meaningful.
However, thanks to those of you who’ve come to help we might now be able to do that, and we’re looking at ways to let you make a completely free classification, perhaps by picking galaxies which are similar to each other from a selection. Once this first cut is done, we’ll get working on it.
Chris
P.S. I have to say thanks to Stuart, who has been keeping the team inspired with his writings about our zoo.
Just a very brief update on Galaxy Zoo. We’ve reached our target of more than 30,000 users and have just upgraded the hardware behind the site to make sure we can cope with as many people as once. We’re hoping to get a couple of new features up on the site in the next 24 hours, and first priority is a discussion forum so people can compare images.
We’ve just been mentioned on slash dot so please bear with us during the tsunami of traffic currently heading our way. If the site goes down again then I’ll try and post updates here and if you’re into that sort of thing, there’s a Galaxy Zoo group on facebook.
Today’s pretty image is a ring galaxy - if you see one of these, we want to know about it.
I’m currently in a talk by Richard Ellis of Caltech as part of this
Now talking about work by graduate student Dan Spark to look for objects at a redshift of 10. First, look for galaxy clusters and look for faint things within them, in the hope that you’ll see distant objects which have been magnified by their light’s passage through the foreground cluster.
…they found lots of faint candidates. Now they have to show that the emission is really from a galaxy at that distance…Oh, very nice. As well as magnifying the galaxies, the lensing by the foreground cluster moves the position of the galaxy, and this depends on distance. Using this fact and lots more observing time they can attempt to rule out other possibilities. This distance does depend, for now, on the detection of a single spectral line, however.
Here’s the image
Is it surprising that so many were seen? Work with Avi Loeb (a theorist) seems to show that there are about 2-3 times more of these than predicted, but can make the star formation more efficient to solve this problem. And that seems to be it - I hope it’s true so I can say I was here, but it would be nice (As Richard said) to have a little more confirmation.
I’ve been absolutely stunned by the initial reaction to Galaxy Zoo; so many emails with so many fantastic images. Perhaps my favourite, found by beccamecca13 whoever she (or he) may be, is below, but there’s lots more where that came from. We’re on BBC News and if your hands strayed toward the ‘email your friends’ button let’s just say that would be appreciated.
Update: We’re being slightly swamped. Please keep telling people about the site, but bear with us if you can’t see any galaxies. We’ll upgrade as soon as possible.
Our latest round up is now available, so go over to Living Space for all that’s new in (and in this case, before) our Universe. Rover expert Doug Ellison of Unmanned Spaceflight brings us up to date with news from Mars, and you should listen to the end to find out what rock music sounds like on Titan.
We’re having some trouble with itunes, so if you normally subscribe to the feed it’ll be quicker to go and get the show yourself today.
