Galaxy Zoo Blog

X-ray paper submitted!

Just a quick note: I’ve finally submitted the paper on the X-ray observations of IC 2497 and the Voorwerp with XMM-Newton and Suzaku. It’s a Letter so we should hear back fairly soon, so stay tuned!

Galaxy Zoo gets highlighted by the 2010 Decadal Survey

Every decade, the US astronomy community gets its leaders together to write up a report on the state of the field and to recommend and rank major projects that should be supported by the government over the next decade. It’s a blue print, a wish list and often also a sober exercise in what to [...]

Chandra Program to study Galaxy Zoo Mergers approved

Good news, everyone!
Earlier this year we submitted a proposal to use the Chandra X-ray Observatory to observe a set of merging galaxies in X-rays. The target list for Cycle 12 has just been released, and with a bit of scanning, you can find a set of targets with names like “GZ_Merger_AGN_1″. These targets are a [...]

The latest on the peas – do they lack metals?

It’s sometimes difficult to know which papers will excite other scientists and get them to follow-up what you’ve done.  Our peas paper already has seven references to it, so I wasn’t entirely surprised to find a whole paper discussing the peas on astro-ph today. Astro-ph is required reading for all astrophysicists and contains pre-prints of [...]

XMM-Newton is observing Hanny’s Voorwerp TODAY!

Hi all,
Just a quick note – our observations of IC 2497 and the Voorwerp have been scheduled for today and are taking place now. Since we’re observing in the X-rays, our “quick snapshot” to see what is going on actually takes almost a whole day. XMM-Newton’s eye isn’t very sharp, so we won’t get a [...]

Who’s looking at the Voorwerp?

I just got a notification from the XMM-Newton Science Operations Centre that our observations of IC 2497 and the Voorwerp have now been scheduled for April 19th. XMM-Newton is esa’s flagship X-ray satellite and can observe photons from 0.2-10 keV. We’ve already got our hard X-ray observations from Suzaku last year, so XMM will have [...]

How to find black holes?

The first step in trying to understand the connection between black holes and galaxies is finding them. But black holes are, well, black. In fact, you might say their blackness is their most defining feature.

So, how do you find them? It turns out that when they’re feeding on infalling gas and dust, a massive black [...]

Black holes – why do galaxies care, anyway?

Now that our paper on AGN host galaxies (galaxies whose black holes are feeding) is out, I will write a few blog posts about what we found with your help. But before we start, a little background.
Why do black holes matter? We now believe that at the centers of most, if not all galaxies, there [...]

Finishing off the Peas Documentary

Dear all,
Many moons back, a large group of Zooites travelled to Oxford to make nearly all of a documentary about Galaxy Zoo, and especially peas, with PulseProject. It was a terrific success, and there’s just one more thing they’d like to do before it’s ready. Can you help?
Colin, who interviewed us all, wants to make [...]

Galaxy Zoo paper on AGN host galaxies accepted!

Dear all,
I am happy to tell you that after a lot of work and a long peer review process, the Galaxy Zoo paper on AGN host galaxies (galaxies whose supermassive black holes are feeding) has finally been accepted by the Astrophysical Journal.

I’ve blogged about it before when we submitted it last year. The paper itself [...]