Tag Archive | Hubble

Eight Years and the 8 Most Talked-About Galaxies in Galaxy Zoo

Continuing the countdown to Galaxy Zoo’s 8th birthday, below are 8 of the most-commented-on galaxies in the active Galaxy Zoo. They range near (in astronomical terms) and far, from gorgeous disks to space-warping groups, and some of them aren’t even galaxies at all!

8. Galaxies Interacting (Arp 112)

image of Arp 112

#merger #arc #g-pair #bulge #tidaltails #ugc #wow #agn #ngc #ngc7806 #arp #markarian #dustlane #available_in_dr7 #spiral #gpair #awesome #tidal #lens #no_lens

A lovely example of the diversity of structures in the Universe. The central galaxy may have been a perfectly symmetric spiral before it was seriously disturbed by the elliptical galaxy on the left side of the shot, and what’s that wispy thing off to the right? Is it a former part of the central galaxy? And what is this all going to look like in a few billion years? Whatever happens, the volunteers made it clear this is a special one to classify and to look at.

7. A Beautiful Lens

Gravitational lens in CANDELS

#lens #lensing #knownlens #arc #lense #interesting

This gorgeous gravitational lens was spotted almost immediately upon the launch of the new Galaxy Zoo within the high-redshift CANDELS data. It generated multiple lively discussions and scientists and volunteers alike weighed in with further information. It turned out in this case that this was one of very few lenses that were already known, but there are likely still unknown lenses buried in the data, waiting to be discovered!

6. Emerald in the sky

image of this mysterious green-gem object

#quasar #edge #lbg #star

Initially identified as a high-redshift star-forming galaxy by one of our seasoned volunteers, a number of people subsequently looked further into the existing scientific literature. There was a lot of debate about this particular point of light, but in the end the volunteers uncovered a later paper confirming that this green gem (which would actually be either very red or nearly invisible to the human eye, as it’s “green” because it only shows up in the infrared filters used for this image) is actually just a star in our galaxy. Bummer, maybe, but this process is also an important part of science.

5. Lord of the Polar Ring

image of polar ring galaxy

#dustlane #polar #polarring #beautiful #polar-ring #elliptical #ring #edgeon #mothership #dust #polaring #question

This spectacular example of a polar ring galaxy couldn’t have been found in the original Galaxy Zoo or Galaxy Zoo 2, because it only made it into the Sloan Digital Sky Survey when the sky coverage was extended.

4. Collisional Ring (Arp 148)

Mayall's Object in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

#merger #arp148 #arp #available_in_dr7 #lookalike #alphabet #ring

It takes a special kind of galaxy crash to make a collisional ring, and you can see this one in progress. It reminded our volunteers and scientists of the Cartwheel galaxy, another spectacular example of these snapshots of a brief moment in time.

3. Triangular Galaxy!

A disturbed spiral galaxy.

#merger #odd #dark #needle #holycow #wow #doublenucleus #tidaldebris #disturbed #rocket #cluster #irregularshape #spaceship #rocketship

Well, this is odd. This galaxy looks like it’s on its own, but it has a rather unusual shape that would usually imply some sort of interaction or collision. Our volunteers discussed what could be causing it – until they viewed a zoomed-out image and it became clear that this galaxy has recently flown by a trio of galaxies, which would be more than enough to disrupt it into this lovely shape.

triangle galaxy and a nearby group of galaxies

2. Hubble Resolves the Distant Universe

edge-on disk galaxy with dust lane

#spiral #overlap #dustlane #starburst #edge-on #edgeon

When a new batch of data taken by the Hubble Space Telescope appeared on the latest Galaxy Zoo, this was one of the first stunners remarked on by several people. Some of the parts of the sky covered by Hubble coincide with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and we linked the surveys up via Talk. Our tireless volunteers launched a thread collecting side-by-side images from SDSS and Hubble, showcasing the power of the world’s greatest space telescope. Hubble’s primary mirror is about the same size as that used by the SDSS, so the differences between the images of the same galaxy are due to the blurring effect of the atmosphere.

SDSS (on Earth) at left, HST (in space) at right.


And, the most talked about image in the latest Galaxy Zoo is…

1. ……..really? this?

A barely-there galaxy.

It’s always the galaxies you least expect.

Okay, okay… If you saw this and said it looks like there isn’t a lot to talk about here, I wouldn’t blame you. And, indeed, there’s only one “short” comment from one of our volunteers, who used our Examine tools and discovered that this little blotch appears to be a very high-redshift galaxy.

However, that same volunteer also started a discussion with the question: just for fun, what’s the highest redshift you’ve found? Others responded, and thus began a quest to find the galaxy in Galaxy Zoo that is the farthest distance from us. This discussion is Galaxy Zoo at its finest, with new and experienced volunteers using the project as inspiration for their own investigations, scouring the scientific literature, and learning about the very early Universe.

It seems like the most likely known candidate so far is a quasar at a redshift of about 5.5 (at which point the Universe was about 1 billion years old), or, if you don’t think a quasar counts, an extended galaxy at = 4 or so (1.5 billion years old). But there’s just so much science wonderfulness here, all of it from our fantastic volunteers, and it all started with a patchy blob and a sense of curiosity.

Galaxy Zoo started with a million blobs (ish) and a sense of adventure. I think that’s fitting.

A Galaxy Walks Into A Bar…

4 barred galaxies from Galaxy Zoo projects past




Galaxy Zoo Bar Lengths classification interface screen shot






Try it out here: Galaxy Zoo: Bar Lengths

bars written in galaxies

First Result from Galaxy Zoo Hubble

Posted on behalf of Tom Melvin:


Here’s the title…..














Posted on behalf of Tom Melvin.

Oh, Sweet Spiral Of Mine



M81 spiral galaxy - panchromatic slide





Milky Way HI map



Horsehead Nebula in Herschel and HST images





More Hubble Features, and More Often!

Here at Zooniverse HQ we’ve been thinking a bit more about those “fuzzy blobs” we talked about during our last hangout. Many of those faint galaxies are among the most distant objects we’ve ever seen, so we really want to learn about how they’ve formed and what they look like, but in some cases they are just too faint to get a really detailed classification. We can probably learn what their overall shape is, and possibly tell whether they’re disturbed or interacting, but spiral arms? Bars? Bulge strength? Not likely. Read More…

Blood Oranges are just like Hubble Galaxies

Hubble CANDELS zoom


  • what are they?
  • why are the images so fuzzy?





What to do with faint galaxies

We’ve received a number of questions on Talk about what to do with faint galaxies, like this one:

Galaxies like this one are not stars or artifacts, they are just veeeery faint, so faint that even a telescope as powerful as Hubble is stretched to its capabilities to image them. When you do see such a faint galaxy, please just answer the questions as best you can. In this case, I’d call this one “smooth”.

Don’t worry about the pixellation. The Wide Field Camera 3 infrared pixels are larger than those of Hubble’s optical camera, but the resolution is still very high. So, even though you see pixels in the image of the galaxy above, it’s actually well resolved. It just happens to be smooth and featureless…

So, what about this one?


Can you see features despite the noise, or is it smooth? It’s your call. Remember, most of these galaxies haven’t been seen before by humans, so there’s no right or wrong answer. Just do your best!

New Images in the New Galaxy Zoo

This post is the first of a series introducing the new Galaxy Zoo. The second is here, but come back in the next few days for more information about our fabulous new site

As you’ve probably already noticed, the Galaxy Zoo interface got a shiny new facelift thanks to the wizards in the Zooniverse development team, but that’s not all. The site is stuffed with new galaxies! These brand new, never-seen-before images come from two places:


The new SDSS images (right), drawn from the latest data release, are better and hopefully easier to classify than the old (left).

You might remember that the original Galaxy Zoo 1 and 2 used images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), a robotic telescope surveying the ‘local’ Universe from its vantage point in New Mexico. These images are now prepared in a slightly different way, in order to highlight subtle details. To better understand these galaxies, drawn from our own backyard, we’re making those improved images available through the new Zoo classification page. (These are actually new galaxies, from parts of the sky that SDSS hadn’t surveyed when we launched Zoo 2).


We’ve already gone though Hubble Space Telescope images with the Hubble Zoo, but there are some exciting new observations available from Hubble that we just couldn’t pass on. In 2009, astronauts on Space Shuttle mission STS-125 visited Hubble for a final time and installed an exciting new camera in the telescope. This camera, called Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) can take large (by Hubble standards!) images of the infrared sky.

NASA astronauts installing the new Wide Field Camera 3 on the Hubble Space Telescope during the final Service Mission 4 (credit: NASA).

As we peer deeper into the Universe, we look into the past, and since the universe is expanding, the galaxies we see are moving away from us faster and faster. This means that the light that left them gets stretched by the time it reaches us. Thus, the light from stars gets “redshifted” and to see a galaxy in the early universe as it would appear in visible light locally, we need an infrared camera.

A weird “clumpy” galaxy spied by Hubble in the early universe. Galaxies like this don’t seem to be around anymore in the local universe, so we’d love to know better what they are and what they will turn into…

Taking infrared images is much harder than optical ones for many reasons, but the most important is that the night sky actually glows in the infrared. This fundamentally limits our ability to take deep infrared images, which is why Hubble’s new WFC3 with its infrared capability is so valuable: in space, there’s no night sky! Hubble is currently using the WFC3 to survey several patches of the sky as part of the CANDELS program (more on that soon!) to generate deep infrared images of galaxies in the early universe and we’re asking you to help us sort through them.


We are also introducing Galaxy Zoo Talk, a place where you can post, share, discuss and collect galaxies you find interesting and want to learn more about. You can of course still join us on the Forum, but Talk will make it easier for you to systematically discuss and analyse your galaxies.

There’s a whole new mountain of galaxies to go through, so happy classifying!

Galaxy Merger Gallery









Meeting the Astronomy World

This guest post is from Anna Han, an undergrad working on the Hubble data from Galaxy Zoo:

I attended the AAS Conference in Austin, Texas with the Yale Astronomy and Physics Department to present the results from my research last summer. Many thanks to everyone in the department and Galaxy Zoo who gave me this opportunity and continue to support me through my work. It is because of their guidance that I was able to present a research poster at the conference this winter and enjoy a whole new experience.

The AAS Conference was fascinating, motivating, and overwhelming all at the same time. Starting from 9:00am every morning, I listened to various compact 10-minute talks given by various PhD candidates, post-docs, and researchers from around the world. Though I must admit some of the ideas presented went over my head, I learned more and more with each talk I heard.

The midday lunch breaks made up one of my favorite parts of the conference. Yes, the ribs in Texas are good. But no amount of delicious southern cuisine compares to how welcome and at ease I felt with fellow astronomers kind enough to invite me, a newbie sophomore undergraduate, to lunch. Lunch became my 2-hour my opportunity to talk one-on-one with other researchers and get informed on their work. When my questions ran out, I gladly took the chance to introduce my own research and use their feedback to better prepare for my poster presentation.

On Thursday morning, I tacked up my poster in the exhibit hall and stood guard, armed with organized details of my research and cookies as bait. Let me confess now that I have never been at or in a science fair, but I imagine it must be similar to what I experienced that day. Non-scientist citizens and experts in AGN alike perused my poster and asked questions. Every once in a while I recognized a familiar face: members from my research group, students I had befriended throughout the conference, and fellow researchers I had shared lunch with stopped by to see my poster. Explaining my research to someone who was interested (either in my work or the cookies) was an immensely rewarding experience. I felt proud of what I had accomplished and so thankful to the people who helped me do it. The encounters with other people also gave me ideas for future directions I could proceed in.

This semester, I plan to continue searching for multiple AGN signatures in grism spectra of clumpy galaxies. My experience at the AAS Conference has inspired me to develop a more systematic search for clumpy galaxies using Galaxy Zoo and explore in more detail the possibility of low redshift galaxies containing multiple AGN. To the citizens of Galaxy Zoo, thank you again, and I hope for your continued support!

You can get a full res PDF version of the poster here.