“Up on a hill, as the day dissolves
With my pencil turning moments into line
High above in the violet sky
A silent silver plane – it draws a golden chain
One by one, all the stars appear
As the great winds of the planet spiral in
Spinning away, like the night sky at Arles
In the million insect storm, the constellations [...]
Speaking of the long-awaited Hubble observations of Hanny’s Voorwerp – where are they? We know certain windows when each can be done, and is supposed to be carried out. One such week-long window has already gone by without getting data, so things are narrowed down a bit.
We have some new results to show off, Hanny’s Voorwerp observed using a space telescope. No, not that space telescope, that’s still coming up (shortly, we hope).
Soon after the initial results showed what a fascinating object Hanny’s
Voorwerp was proving to be, it was entered in the observing schedule for NASA’S GALEX satellite (GALaxy Evolution EXplorer). [...]
“Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time…
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.”
- Bob Dylan, “Mr Tambourine Man”
After last [...]
“Love is a burning flame
And it makes a fiery ring
Bringing hurt to the heart’s desire
I fell in the ring of fire”
- Johnny Cash
Before I venture any deeper into the mysterious world of Ring Galaxies, I thought I would give a quick introduction to the archetypal ring galaxy – the “Collisional Ring”.
Collisional Rings are formed when a smaller [...]
We’ve been a little quiet over at Merger Zoo recently. In the first three months of this project, you have viewed nearly two million simulations for nearly 40 different galaxies. Of these two million, you have picked about 30000 galaxies that we have been doing further investigations on. In short, we have been extremely [...]
Ellipses are red,
Spirals are blue*
But a heart-shaped ring galaxy?
Haven’t a clue!
My name is Georgia Barrie and I’m a Masters student at Oxford University. I’m currently working on a research project with Chris Lintott, attempting to explain the formation of the elusive ring galaxies. Thanks to the work of Galaxy Zoo users, I am now in [...]
I’m happy to announce that the first paper using Galaxy Zoo 2 data was submitted (to MNRAS) yesterday.
In this work we used an early look at the information you have provided us on the presence of bars in a sample of GZ2 galaxies too look at trends of the bar fraction (basically how likely a [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]