New Galaxy Zoo blog: Galaxy Zoo 2 data release
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by JeanTate
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.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