The First Volunteer-inspired Galaxy Zoo Paper is Submitted!

At long last the ‘Peas’ have been submitted to MNRAS (The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society,). The ‘Peas’ were discovered by users right here in Galaxy Zoo who noticed a strange class of small green galaxies at redshifts near z=0.2. A dedicated group of volunteered collected a sample of these galaxies. Then Kevin Schawinski found an astronomer (Carie [me ]) to pull them together and look at them in detail.

We finally met at AAS (the American Astronomical Society) meeting this January at the Long Beach California convention center. Chris Lintott, Jordan Raddick, and Daniel Thomas and I sat down and discussed the paper draft. In the ensuing 3 months, I’ve been working hard at writing up all of our results with the help of all of the co-authors. The peer review process can take a while, but as the publication process goes forward we’ll keep you up to date.

Coming Soon: a new blog-post where will lay out the details of what makes the Peas so exciting.

Carie

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 14th, 2009 at 5:21 pm and is filed under Site News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

elizabeth

Apr 14th

Wonderful news!
Pat

Apr 14th

Thanks Carie. Well done again to all the Zooites that have contributed to this paper and project. And Carie for all your hard work too.
rick

Apr 14th

Very good news indeed! Thanks Carrie for your work.
hjMizzou62

Apr 14th

Very interesting, I didn’t have any of these “Peas” in the galaxies I classified.

Thanks for sharing!
Rod Guice

Apr 14th

Oustanding news! Congratulations to all on efforts to date and good luck on the peer review process! I saw the “Green Peas” string in the Forum, and will spend some time going through it.
Hanny

Apr 14th

Yay! Thanks Carie!
Marcy9

Apr 14th

Great news, congratulations Carolin and Galaxy Zoo team.
Joseph K. H. Cheng

Apr 15th

Thank you very much, Carie for your great effort.

JKHC.
zeus2007

Apr 15th

Cool!
Ian O'Neill

Apr 15th

Hey, this looks awesome. Will there be a submission to arXiv any time soon? I’d love to see your conclusions. Great stuff!

Cheers, Ian
Thomas J

Apr 15th

Great work Carie and the team
Mark

Apr 15th

Hi Carie
Good news!
Hope the peas (I mean peer) review process goes well.
I can’t wait to read a summery.
It was nice to put a face to the name.
Kevin

Apr 15th

@Ian:
We generally don’t post papers to astro-ph (arxiv) before they have been accepted, or at least have gone through the initial review.
Jordan

Apr 15th

Hearty congratulations to all of you that worked on the peas project. The way in which everyone has worked together on the peas research is one of the very coolest things about Galaxy Zoo.
Stan Barraclough

Apr 22nd

Proves to me what can be achieved when even novices work together and the results are co-ordinated by a profesional. Facinating.
Sérgio

Apr 23rd

Great news! Good job for everyone!
Mariod505

Apr 24th

So all the GalaxyZoo users who were critical in the research for this paper get buried under the “et al” in Land et al. (2008)?? GalaxyZoo’s biggest problem is that it dumbs down the research aspect of what individual contributors do, that even they lose respect for the monkey work they are doing. People are more intelligent than this website gives them credit for… If you build an interface where people can do more intelligent research collaboratively, I think you’ll be blown away with the discoveries they make. A dozen astronomers can’t possibly coordinate the collective intelligence of the online community. Let go of the reins, and this community will learn to fly.
Arthur

Apr 25th

Congrats to all of you! Well deserved for your initiatives and combined efforts. An inspiration to keep working in the Zoo.
Mukund

Apr 25th

Great job. Thanks to the whole team!!
Kevin

Apr 25th

@Mariod505

The title page of every Galaxy Zoo paper includes a link to the poster where everyone participating in GZ1 who allowed their name to be published is listed. In the peas paper specifically, we do acknowledge the peas corps individually.
Cliff Boer

May 3rd

Well done to all of the team!

I recommend that the interface allow for more detailed observations to be recorded:

Would the data not serve you better if we were able to select from more specific alternatives when observing something unusual?

Additionally please consider the options of ‘equal’, ‘can’t decide’, or ‘none of the above’ in some of the places where we are asked to make a choice.
trees

May 4th

Yep, I agree. We should have a better chance in sending descriptions of ’stuff’ which is often much more intriguing than the galaxy we evaluate.

In fact, I’m pretty sure that I did see one or more of those ‘peas’ but there was no way I could determine that they were special.
Dee

May 4th

Hey this is great news. I wish I knew what the interesting part about the Peas is…can’t wait for your next blog about it.

I didn’t see this one in your pictures http://cas.sdss.org/dr7/en/tools/quicklook/quickobj.asp?id=587722983903199368

although you may not have put all of them in your blog.
trees

May 5th

And, certainly a lot of blue peas.
Anonymous

May 20th

Hey,
Amazing stuff. Looking forward to learning more from you about these peas

By the way,
how do I point at (RA:DEC) GalZooimg_q4_a2_n7.jpg
Galaxy Zoo Blog » Pea Hunting preamble

Nov 11th

[...] Greetings from the ESO Guest House, in Santiago de Chile! As I described in a blog post) a while ago, I am here on a mission to hunt for more distant counterparts to the ‘Peas’) which were first identified by Galaxy Zoo participants. [...]