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Title:
Galaxy Zoo: morphologies derived from visual inspection of galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
Authors:
Lintott, Chris J.; Schawinski, Kevin; Slosar, Anže; Land, Kate; Bamford, Steven; Thomas, Daniel; Raddick, M. Jordan; Nichol, Robert C.; Szalay, Alex; Andreescu, Dan; Murray, Phil; Vandenberg, Jan
Affiliation:
AA(Oxford Astrophysics, Denys Wilkinson Building, Keble Road, Oxford OX1 3RH), AB(Oxford Astrophysics, Denys Wilkinson Building, Keble Road, Oxford OX1 3RH), AC(Oxford Astrophysics, Denys Wilkinson Building, Keble Road, Oxford OX1 3RH; Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Physics Department, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA), AD(Oxford Astrophysics, Denys Wilkinson Building, Keble Road, Oxford OX1 3RH), AE(Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, University of Portsmouth, Mercantile House, Hampshire Terrace, Portsmouth PO1 2EG), AF(Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, University of Portsmouth, Mercantile House, Hampshire Terrace, Portsmouth PO1 2EG), AG(Department of Physics and Astronomy, Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA), AH(Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, University of Portsmouth, Mercantile House, Hampshire Terrace, Portsmouth PO1 2EG), AI(Department of Physics and Astronomy, Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA), AJ(LinkLab, 4506 Graystone Avenue, Bronx, NY 10471, USA), AK(Fingerprint Digital Media, 9 Victoria Close, Newtownards, Co. Down BT23 7GY), AL(Department of Physics and Astronomy, Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA)
Publication:
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 389, Issue 3, pp. 1179-1189. (MNRAS Homepage)
Publication Date:
09/2008
Origin:
MNRAS
Astronomy Keywords:
methods: data analysis , galaxies: elliptical and lenticular, cD , galaxies: general , galaxies: spiral
DOI:
10.1111/j.1365-2966.2008.13689.x
Bibliographic Code:
2008MNRAS.389.1179L

Abstract

In order to understand the formation and subsequent evolution of galaxies one must first distinguish between the two main morphological classes of massive systems: spirals and early-type systems. This paper introduces a project, Galaxy Zoo, which provides visual morphological classifications for nearly one million galaxies, extracted from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). This achievement was made possible by inviting the general public to visually inspect and classify these galaxies via the internet. The project has obtained more than 4 × 107 individual classifications made by ~105 participants. We discuss the motivation and strategy for this project, and detail how the classifications were performed and processed. We find that Galaxy Zoo results are consistent with those for subsets of SDSS galaxies classified by professional astronomers, thus demonstrating that our data provide a robust morphological catalogue. Obtaining morphologies by direct visual inspection avoids introducing biases associated with proxies for morphology such as colour, concentration or structural parameters. In addition, this catalogue can be used to directly compare SDSS morphologies with older data sets. The colour-magnitude diagrams for each morphological class are shown, and we illustrate how these distributions differ from those inferred using colour alone as a proxy for morphology.

This publication has been made possible by the participation of more than 100000 volunteers in the Galaxy Zoo project. Their contributions are individually acknowledged at http://www.galaxyzoo.org/Volunteers.aspx

E-mail: cjl@astro.ox.ac.uk (CJL); kevins@astro.ox.ac.uk (KS)


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