Chris Lintott’s Universe

I’m still in the US, where we’ve been filming pieces for the next few Sky at Nights. I need to write up the amazing two days we spent in mission control for Phoenix, but for now the Discovery blog has details of the Large Binocular Telescope and the alien-hunting Allen Telescope Array.

Having left the Sky at Night team crowing about their upgrade to first class on the way home and have headed off to visit Pamela. I’m giving a public talk tomorrow (Monday) night about Galaxy Zoo and citizen science more generally, and for those who can’t join us we’ll be broadcasting the event online.

The link is here, although you should be able to watch and chat below. The talk starts at 7pm Central, 1am Tuesday morning BST and midnight GMT.

Streaming Video by Ustream.TV

I’m shortly off of my travels again, recording interviews for Sky at Night in California and Arizona. On the way back, I’m visiting Pamela of astronomycast fame to work on a few projects. If anyone lives in or around St Louis, U.S.A., then you might be interested, nay, delighted, to know that you can come and listen to me talk about Galaxy Zoo and related issues on the evening of June 30th. Details are over here - and we’ll try and ustream the talk for those who can’t make it.

I wrote yesterday about the somewhat surprising link that’s been discovered between the tightness of a galaxy’s spiral arms (the angle at which they uncurl) and the size of the black hole that lurks in their centre. I managed to catch up with Marc Seigar, and the interview is now up on Youtube

One of the most intriguing of the morning press releases is now being described by Marc Seigar from the University of Arkansas, who has been trying to weigh the supermassive black holes that lurk at the centre of galaxies. Ideally, you’d do this by measuring the speed of the gas rotating around it, but that’s hard for distant galaxies.

Prof Seigar’s suggestion is to look not directly at the central gas, but - if the galaxy you’re interested in is a spiral - then you just look at the arms. His team found that the looser the arms, the smaller the black hole - and you could potentially see these features out to billions of light-years away. Compare Andromeda with the other major member (along with the Milky Way) of the local group, M33, the Triangulum Galaxy.

Andromeda has just about the tightest arms of any spiral galaxy, and a large black hole, weighing in at 180 million times the mass of the Sun. Triangulum has loose arms, and if it has a black hole at all it’s smaller than 1500 solar masses.

I have to confess I was sceptical about this release when I saw it, but the data shown during the press conference looks fairly convincing. It’s especially exciting for me as Galaxy Zoo 2 will collect information about the tightness of spiral arms among many other things, and it’s a fascinating thought to think that we might be probing the behaviour of the central black hole at the same time.

What is causing this link? It’s fair to say that they don’t know, but are blaming differences in the distribution of dark matter.

I know I promised you a Mercury post. I’ve been distracted by this thing, discovered by one of the Galaxy Zoo users, Hanny.

The question is - what is it? We’re applying to use the VLA to find out, and the deadline’s tonight.

As the AAS coverage continues to trickle on, Pamela has posted a long interview she did with Jordan (from Galaxy Zoo) and I. You can catch the whole thing here; I think Pamela may win the award for the hardest opening question of all time.

The AAS group liveblog over at Astronomy Cast has done a fantastic job of providing all the news from the conference. Phil Plait caught up with me earlier and asked me about the Galaxy Zoo cosmology results we announced today; you can see the result below. I think we should have found more light, and I shouldn’t have worn this shirt…

This morning has been insanely busy; rewriting my talk which I’m giving tomorrow in the light of the results of the Galaxy Zoo bias study hasn’t helped. (You can see the latest here.) I did manage to sit in on an excellent press conference this morning though; the highlight was the results from the STAGES survey of a galaxy supercluster. Pamela sums up my feelings here. Oh, and there was a double Einstein ring, too.

I’ve just made my first post on the new Galaxy Zoo blog, which is designed to keep you up to date with the process of writing the first papers. A roundup of the 2007 coming on this site tomorrow…

This is the 3.5m WIYN telescope on Kitt Peak.

In April, 5 nights of time will be spent following up work done by the good people of the Galaxy Zoo. The actual project is rather unexpected; early in the project Bill Keel of the University of Alabama appeared on our forum, asking people to keep an eye out for overlapping galaxies. Not mergers, but overlaps. Not all are as spectacular as NGC3314 (the object that also provides Prof. Keel’s handle on the forum) but our industrious users have discovered lots of them - and now one of the largest and most modern telescopes in the world is following up their discovery. Christmas come early, if you ask me.