Wednesday

Detection of galactic structures, such as bars and spiral arms, is a difficult process to automate. Galaxy Zoo has been great for determining if structure there is structure in a galaxy, but it does not provide information about where in the galaxy that structure is. To solve this problem, we used the Zooniverse’s project builder to create Galaxy Zoo: 3D. This project asked volunteers to perform 4 tasks: mark the center of a galaxy, mark the location of foreground stars, draw the bar, and draw the spiral arms. By combining these user drawn masks with IFU data taken by MaNGA, we are studying how these morphological features interact with the ages, chemical make-up and kinematics of the stars and gas in the galaxy.