Galaxy Zoo Talk

New Galaxy Zoo blog: Galaxy Zoo 2 data release

  • JeanTate by JeanTate

    Galaxy Zoo 2 data release:

    Galaxy Zoo 2 data release

    It’s always exciting to see a new Galaxy Zoo paper out, but today’s
    release of our latest is
    really exciting. Galaxy Zoo 2: detailed morphological classifications
    for 304,122 galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, now accepted
    for publication in the
    Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, is the result of a lot of hard work by Kyle Willett and friends.

    enter image description here

    Lead author Kyle, seen here taking a rare moment away from reducing
    Galaxy Zoo data.

    Galaxy Zoo 2 was the first of
    our projects to go beyond simply splitting galaxies into ellipticals
    and spirals, and so these results provide data on bars, on the number
    of spiral arms and on much more besides. The more complicated project
    made things more complicated for us in turning raw clicks on the
    website into scientific calculations – we had to take into account the
    way the different classifications depended on each other, and still
    had to worry about the inevitable effect that more distant, fainter or
    smaller galaxies will be less likely to show features.

    We’ve got plenty of science out of the Zoo 2 data set while we were
    resolving these problems, but the good news is that all of that work
    is now done, and in addition to the paper we’re making the data
    available for anyone to use. You can find it alongside data from
    Zoo 1 at
    data.galaxyzoo.org. One of the
    most rewarding things about the project so far has been watching other
    astronomers make use of the original data set – and now they have much
    more information about each galaxy to go on.

    Posted