Galaxy Zoo Talk

Hello from Hawai'i

  • zookeeper by zookeeper admin, scientist

    Several of us are observing using the CSO telescope on Mauna Kea for the next few hours - we'll try and put posts on the blog here : http://galaxyzooblog.wordpress.com/?p=7386 - but as there are three of us we should have time to dip in here to answer questions.

    This is a follow-up from the project that started Galaxy Zoo - an attempt to look at blue and therefore starforming ellipticals...

    Chris

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  • Capella05 by Capella05 moderator

    Wow! Exciting stuff.

    First question - why is it so important to observe / find blue ellipticals?

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  • zookeeper by zookeeper admin, scientist

    The colour tells you about recent star formation, and so a blue elliptical is one that's had recent star formation; way back in 2009 we found that many of them had actually lost the gas that they would need to keep forming stars, and that they were (presumably) on their way to becoming old, red and dead like most of the ellipticals we see around us.

    However, there's another possibility - the gas may have been heated up rather than expelled, and that's what these observations (which we're piggybacking on someone else's time because the weather isn't good enough for their more fancy observations) are designed to tell us.

    Sorry for the delay - it suddenly hit us that none of us knew how to use this telescope and it's been a bit of a steep learning curve...

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  • Capella05 by Capella05 moderator

    Next question - what would of prevented it (the gas - insert rolled eyes ) from being expelled in the first place?

    As for the delay - no worries! I just find this aspect of astronomy so fascinating!

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  • zookeeper by zookeeper admin, scientist

    Gravity! Without any other force cold gas should happily just hang out near the centre of the galaxy. So to get a sudden drop in molecular gas it must be (1) used up (but we can predict how long that would take in normal circumstances), or (2) heated (so it ceases to be molecular, or (3) expelled...trying to understand which it is is rather difficult, even before we start worrying about what the cause is.

    We're currently struggling a bit - the telescope isn't quite performing and we aren't managing to find even the standard sources that we'd like to calibrate with.

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  • Capella05 by Capella05 moderator

    No worries πŸ˜ƒ

    Good luck!

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  • Capella05 by Capella05 moderator

    An update?

    I think a few of us have been checking in to see how things are going... πŸ˜‰

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  • zookeeper by zookeeper admin, scientist

    Sorry - we shut down for the night a couple of hours ago, just before the Sun came up. We ended up by observing one of the ellipticals in the paper that Kevin and I led in 2009...

    So not too bad a night - weather stayed constant, and the telescope mostly behaved itself (and we only made a few mistakes). But it would have been nice to have an obvious detection, but no luck - there probably is something buried in the data (or we picked a few galaxies which are already devoid of gas) but it'll take more work to find it. We might be back tomorrow- I'll keep you informed.

    C

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  • Capella05 by Capella05 moderator

    Cheers Chris!

    Edited to add: Pictures πŸ˜„

    Yes, I know it is not all sunshine and roses πŸ˜ƒ but I think a blog post on what happens when you have telescope time could be fascinating for us lay men!

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  • zookeeper by zookeeper admin, scientist

    Morning. We got time again. I need coffee.

    We're trying a new target first thing in the morning. In the meantime: Pictures from last night are here : http://blog.galaxyzoo.org/2014/07/12/sunset-in-hawaii/

    Here's one of the other observers, showing signs of strain.

    One of the observers

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  • Capella05 by Capella05 moderator

    Eeeeeeehhhhh - A cat!

    Cheers Chris πŸ˜„

    Much appreciated!

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  • vrooje by vrooje admin, scientist

    Looks like I may be taking over a Remote Observing shift today from @zookeeper -- with Meg and Becky as well. Right now the humidity is pretty high and conditions aren't quite right yet, but we're keeping a close eye on it so hopefully we'll get to do some more observing today!

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  • vrooje by vrooje admin, scientist

    Update: We're spending time on the same source we were on a couple of nights ago, trying hard to see if we see any extra emission in the spectrum that's due to cold gas. We've done a quick add of all the exposures we've taken so far, and:

    enter image description here

    You tell me: do you see a blip above the noise anywhere? It would be several bins wide. We're marginally optimistic, but I won't tell you where we think we see it, in case we bias you. πŸ˜ƒ

    We're going to keep observing on this as long as we can and see whether the signal improves over the noise... conditions aren't great, but we're pressing on.

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  • vrooje by vrooje admin, scientist

    PS - on our Skype feed I can see @mschwamb 's cat Stella (pictured earlier in the thread) hanging out atop a kitchen cupboard, overseeing our observations. Stella is such a sweet cat.

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  • c_cld by c_cld in response to vrooje's comment.

    @ vrooje Are you searching

    Molecule Transition Frequency

    SiO 5–4 217.104984 GHz

    ??

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  • vrooje by vrooje admin, scientist in response to C_cld's comment.

    Good guess -- it's the CO2-1 transition, but at redshift z = 0.0533...

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  • klmasters by klmasters scientist, admin

    Maybe at -100km/s - there's a lot of white space above zero….

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  • zookeeper by zookeeper admin, scientist

    This is my new data reduction pipeline.

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  • JeanTate by JeanTate in response to vrooje's comment.

    Any chance we could get a FITS, or CSV file? Myself, I'd prefer to do quantitative analysis on the data ....

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  • vrooje by vrooje admin, scientist in response to JeanTate's comment.

    Unlike every other telescope I've ever observed on, this one doesn't output its observations in FITS format! It saves every observation of the whole night to a single file that has a format just for this telescope, and it requires special software to extract the data. Apparently I could theoretically extract a FITS file, but I can't get the commands to work and the documentation is... sparse. So for the moment we're doing everything from within that software. @rjsmethurst Is working on a more sophisticated analysis (though currently still a first look) right now! πŸ˜ƒ

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  • JeanTate by JeanTate in response to vrooje's comment.

    Thanks. Well, I guess we could always do a Bicep2 trick ('scrape the data from slides') πŸ˜‰

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  • zookeeper by zookeeper admin, scientist in response to vrooje's comment.

    This is what happens when you let optical observers into the sub-mm - the software's perfectly standard. It's just that all my notes are more than five years old...

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  • mschwamb by mschwamb translator in response to zookeeper's comment.

    This optical planetary astronomer says thanks for letting her look at galaxies in the sub-mm . My first time ever observing a source outside the Milky Way, not by accident!

    I'm crashing Galaxy Zoo Talk. I hope that's okay. I wrote a quick blog post of what we were up to last night before the night started and a bit during observing. You can find it here.

    Cheers,

    ~Meg

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  • vrooje by vrooje admin, scientist

    Indeed the software does seem to be very powerful; I just don't know how to use it yet!

    Nice blog post from Meg. πŸ˜ƒ

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  • mschwamb by mschwamb translator

    Hiya,

    A note to say we're currently observing on the CSO for this same project. We have one night. So far the weather is fabulous. We'll try to check in from time to time here, since we have 3 observers. I'm remoting from Taiwan and the Oxford lot are remoting from the UK. We're currently taking a pointing now to calibrate the telescope's position.

    We're also tweeting. You can check out the hastag csoing

    Cheers,

    ~Meg

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  • mschwamb by mschwamb translator

    We're onto the last source of the night. Our plan was to only observe 2 galaxies. It's a fabulous night on Mauna Kea.

    Cheers,

    ~Meg

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  • mschwamb by mschwamb translator

    I forgot to mention, the next nights for this project are sometime in early spring next year. So more photons hopefully to come and more detections of the CO2-1 transition in other galaxies we hope.

    Cheers,

    ~Meg

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