It’s been a bit quiet round here, hasn’t it? I didn’t mean to disappear quite so suddenly, but I’ve been thoroughly distracted this summer. Still, I’m back now and I’ve got lots to write about, including trips to JPL, Jodrell and Birr and a guest blog exploring CERN which will be coming up later this week.
Otherwise, it’s been Galaxy Zoo that’s been distracting me. The Telegraph is reporting today on the most interesting of our preliminary results. We should say preliminary in bold, though, because while we’re convinced the signal is real (that is to say, the data really does show this effect) we need to run some tests to check this isn’t human bias at work.
Thanks for bearing with me while I’ve been away from the keyboard; lots more to come over the next few weeks, I promise.
George Jones on October 17, 2007
Is there a known metric that gives both correlated galactic rotations and an expanding universe?
chrislintott on October 18, 2007
It’s not known to me, but then getting from the metric to predicting galaxy rotation is a long road. Let’s check the result is right first, and then see where we go from there.
Procyan on October 20, 2007
Hi Chris, great job(s) so far! This may be on the blogs but I cant find an answer. Regarding human bias, lets say there was a bias towards anti. Then you wouldn’t see any directionality would you? All directions would look anti. But the whole buzz is about anti being associated with direction.
Doesn’t that require clockwise to be associated with the opposite direction?
Else, I have a completely wrong picture. Can you shed some light?
chrislintott on October 21, 2007
Well, that’s the thing. We thought we looking for a direction, but have found an excess of one type over the other. Of course, as Sloan covers about a quarter of the sky, that’s perfectly consistent with there being a strong direction; we’re working on finding some data from the opposite quarter of the sky.
Procyan on October 21, 2007
Thank you! I hope that data from the opposite quarter becomes available. If possible, I’d suggest keeping a lid on coordinates for the GZ analyzers. The design is stronger if they just don’t know until its all over. These are certainly interesting times!