GALAXY ANALYSIS AND IDENTIFICATION

LAB PROCEDURE
Galaxy Analysis: Galactic Astronomy for Citizen Scientists

Learning Goals: Students will participate in an online volunteer effort to contribute to galactic
astronomy called Galaxy Zoo. They will learn how volunteers, or citizen scientists, can be part of a
solution for analyzing large astronomy datasets such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

Materials: Galaxy Zoo website and Galaxy Mergers on Galaxy Zoo site

Pre-lab activity: Galactic Astronomy with Citizen Scientists pre-lab exercise

Introduction: Galaxies are large structures containing a combination of stars, interstellar gas and dust,
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and dark matter. A single galaxy can have as few as a million (10 ) stars for a dwarf galaxy to as many as
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a trillion (10 ) stars for a giant elliptical galaxy. These stars, and the other forms of matter, are all
gravitationally bound to the galaxy making it, in one sense, a single structure. The diameter of galaxies
ranges from about 1,000 to 100,000 parsecs. The number of galaxies in the visible universe is estimated
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to be on the order of hundreds of billions (10 ). Galaxies are important for many reasons. They form
the building blocks for the large-scale structure of the universe. By observing galaxies, astronomers can
test theories about how the universe began and how it might evolve in the future.

Traditionally, astronomers have categorized, or classified, galaxies according to their shape. This type of
scheme is also referred to as morphological. The most widely used is the Hubble Classification Scheme.
(see figure below)

Hubble Scheme image from NASA - MSU/Bozeman CERES Project

In this scheme, various types of elliptical galaxies are on the left. Their shapes change from round
spherical types, through more squashed watermelon-like shapes, to a stretched, or prolate, cigar-like
shape. These designations all begin with E. In the middle of the diagram is a class of galaxies known as
lenticulars and are given the designator S0. These galaxies have a large central bulge that is similar to
elliptical galaxies. However, they also have a flat disk-like region, which, though it apparently lacks spiral
arms, is similar to spiral galaxies.

Branching away from the S0 galaxies are the spiral galaxies. The top branch contains spiral galaxies
arranged according to the size of their central bulge and the tightness of the spiral arms. These are
labeled Sa, Sb, and Sc. The bottom branch contains spiral galaxies that have bars connecting the bulge
to the spiral arms. The galaxies are labeled SBa, SBb, and SBc. This scheme as originally proposed by
Edwin Hubble in the 1930s classified any other galaxy that did not fit into one of the previous types as
simply “irregular”. Other schemes, such as one proposed by de Vaucouleurs, have extended the original
one by adding additional spiral categories, a third “fork”, and categorizing dwarf galaxies.

In general, elliptical galaxies have less gas than spirals. They are composed of older, red stars and have
few blue stars. Spiral galaxies tend to have more gas with active regions of star formation characterized
by blue stars.

Part 1. Galaxy Classification with Galaxy Zoo

Since 2000, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has been using dedicated telescopes to perform an
optical and spectroscopic survey of much of the sky. During the various phases of the project, SDSS has
imaged over 930,000 galaxies. Traditionally, astronomers would have to manually inspect each of the
images and classify the galaxy according to the Hubble scheme. Doing this for almost a million galaxies
would obviously take a long time.

In 2007, an online project called Galaxy Zoo was created to allow members of the public to help classify
the galaxies from the SDSS. The project is managed by a team of researchers from several different
universities including Oxford, Portsmouth, and Johns Hopkins. Users of the site are presented with an
image of a galaxy and are asked a series of questions. First they are asked to determine if the galaxy is
round or has a disk or other features. This is equivalent to separating elliptical galaxies from disk galaxies
(spirals and lenticulars). The other questions guide the user into quantifying how squashed the elliptical
galaxy is or to discuss the characteristics of any visible spiral arms.

The Galaxy Zoo team is very proud of their large, dedicated team of volunteers. They had over 150,000
users contribute to the first round of research and expect even more in the future. Having such a large
number of users can be an advantage for several reasons.

Go to the Galaxy Zoo site and register or sign in at:

https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/zookeeper/galaxy-zoo/

After registering, each student should complete the “Galaxy Tutorial” activity, which is a training session
designed to help you understand how to classify galaxies. After completing the training, start the
“Galaxy Analysis” activity. Each student should classify 20 galaxies. You instructor may give you a time
period, and ask you to continue until the time is up. Set up a spread sheet and record ID, initials of
person doing the classifying, shape and color of each galaxy. The choices for shape are elliptical, disk or
irregular (this is not an option for this part of galaxy zoo, but you can record this if you see a galaxy that
is obviously not elliptical or spiral, but instead has a distorted shape). The choices for color are red or
blue. Color is sometimes hard to determine. Some galaxies may appear yellow or orange in the images
shown. For the purposes of this lab, any galaxy that does not have an obvious blue portion is considered
red by default.

Part II: Your question

As a small group come up with a question that you can ask based on the data available on the data bases
and the Galaxy Zoo site. For example, you might look at the z value, remembering this value times the
speed of light gives the galaxy speed and is directly related to distance.