Galaxy Zoo Talk

Tred of the human eye to anti-clockwise spirals.

  • SN1993 by SN1993

    The post from Wikipedia about the Galaxy Zoo (in portuguese), says there was a big spiral anti-clockwise cataloging and the cause could be a trend of the human eye. Someone also has doubt when shapes that tend a bit to spirals anti-clockwise?

    Posted

  • Budgieye by Budgieye moderator

    It seems that for the whole Universe, there is no difference in spin directions. Any difference was put down to bias by the classifiers. But in each neighbourhood of galaxies, there was a slight alignment of spins.

    Publication: Galaxy Zoo: the large-scale spin statistics of spiral galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey by Land, Kate; Slosar, Anže; Lintott, Chris; Andreescu, Dan; Bamford, Steven; Murray, Phil; Nichol, Robert; Raddick, M. Jordan; Schawinski, Kevin; Szalay, Alex; Thomas, Daniel; Vandenberg, Jan http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2008MNRAS.388.1686L no significant difference in spin direction found in the large scale universe

    Publication: Galaxy Zoo: a correlation between the coherence of galaxy spin chirality and star formation efficiency by Jimenez, Raul; Slosar, Anže; Verde, Licia; Bamford, Steven; Lintott, Chris; Schawinski, Kevin; Nichol, Robert; Andreescu, Dan; Land, Kate; Murray, Phil; Raddick, M. Jordan; Szalay, Alex; Thomas, Daniel; Vandenberg, Jan http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010MNRAS.404..975J Very distant and therefore young galaxies have a slight alignment of spin direction, probably from being formed from the filament.

    Posted

  • zutopian by zutopian

    Recent paper by non-GZ astronomers:

    On the nature and correction of the spurious S-wise spiral galaxy winding bias in Galaxy Zoo 1
    Authors: Wayne Hayes, Darren Davis, Pedro Silva

    The Galaxy Zoo 1 catalog displays a bias towards the S-wise winding direction in spiral galaxies which has yet to be explained. The lack of an explanation confounds our attempts to verify the Cosmological Principle, and has spurred some debate as to whether a bias exists in the real universe. The bias manifests not only in the obvious case of trying to decide if the universe as a whole has a winding bias, but also in the more insidious case of selecting which galaxies to include in a winding direction survey. While the former bias has been accounted for in a previous image-mirroring study, the latter has not. Furthermore, the bias has never been corrected in the GZ1 catalog, as only a small sample of the GZ1 catalog was re-examined during the mirror study.
    We show that the existing bias is a human selection effect rather than a human chirality bias. (...)

    (Submitted on 22 Oct 2016)
    https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.07060

    Posted