Galaxy Zoo 1: data release of morphological classifications for nearly 900 000 galaxies

By Chris J. Lintott, Kevin Schawinski, Steven Bamford, A. Slosar, K. Land, D. Thomas, E. Edmondson, Karen L. Masters, Robert Nichol, J. Raddick and 4 more. 2010

631 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Morphology is a powerful indicator of a galaxy’s dynamical and merger history. It is strongly correlated with many physical parameters, including mass, star formation history and the distribution of mass. The Galaxy Zoo project collected simple morphological classifications of nearly 900 000 galaxies drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, contributed by hundreds of thousands of volunteers. This large number of classifications allows us to exclude classifier error, and measure the influence of subtle biases inherent in morphological classification. This paper presents the data collected by the project, alongside measures of classification accuracy and bias. The data are now publicly available and full catalogues can be downloaded in electronic format from http://data.galaxyzoo.org.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Ecology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/59559d93e8a7b185c7c47d42a7ac7e423279baa7

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Citations in the corpus

Galaxy Zoo 2: detailed morphological classifications for 304,122 galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (2013, methodology): “Huertas-Company et al. (2011) directly compared their results to the GZ1 sample from Lintott et al. (2011).”
MegaMorph - multiwavelength measurement of galaxy structure: complete Sersic profile information from modern surveys (2012, methodology): “We aim to investigatethis in future by drawing on the data and resources of Galaxy Zoo (Lintott et al. 2011; Masters et al. 2011) AlthoughGALFITM already supports multiple components, an adapted version ofGALAPAGOS-2 will be needed for this work.”
Dissecting the size evolution of elliptical galaxies since z∼ 1: puffing-up versus minor-merging scenarios (2011, methodology): “We take advantage of the fact that virtually all the galaxies in the sample of Graves et al. (2009) have their morphology visually studied by the Galaxy Zoo project (Lintott et al. 2011).”
Early type galaxies have been the predominant morphological class for massive galaxies since only z~1 (2011, neutral): “Moreover, all our SDSS local galaxies have been visually classified within the Galaxy Zoo project (Lintott et al. 2011).”
The Evolution of Galaxy Structure Over Cosmic Time (2014, background): “…a resurgence with the advent of Citizen Science projects such as Galaxy Zoo which provides online tools for non-scientists to classify over a million galaxies (Lintott et al. 2011) as well as large Hubble Space Telescope projects such as CANDELS (e.g., Kocevski et al. 2011; Kartaltepe et al. 2014).”
Dawes Review 4: Spiral Structures in Disc Galaxies (2014, methodology): “According to the Galaxy Zoo project, spiral galaxies make up about two thirds of all massive galaxies, whilst around one third are ellipticals, and a few per cent merging galaxies (Lintott et al. 2011; Willett et al. 2013).”
LSST: From Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products (2008, background): “…received by Sky in Google Earth68 (Scranton et al. 2007) and the hundreds of thousands of volunteers classifying galaxies in the Galaxy Zoo project (Lintott et al. 2011) and its extensions demonstrate that the impact of sky surveys extends far beyond fundamental science progress and reaches all of…”
What drives the growth of black holes (2011, methodology): “Using morphological classifications of SDSS galaxies from the Galaxy Zoo project (Lintott et al., 2011), Darg et al. (2010) estimated that only ≈ 1% of AGNs reside in systems clearly undergoing a major merger.”
THE TENTH DATA RELEASE OF THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY: FIRST SPECTROSCOPIC DATA FROM THE SDSS-III APACHE POINT OBSERVATORY GALACTIC EVOLUTION EXPERIMENT (2013, methodology): “New in DR10 are morphological classifications of SDSS images of galaxies by 200,000 citizen scientists via the Galaxy Zoo project (Lintott et al. 2008, 2011; Willett et al. 2013).”
Galaxy evolution in groups and clusters: star formation rates, red sequence fractions and the persistent bimodality (2011, methodology): “…confirmed that this population of active but red galaxies is caused primarily by dusty spirals by applying Galaxy Zoo morphological classifications (Lintott et al. 2011) to this population: ∼70 per cent are identified as spirals and ∼50 per cent are edge-on spirals (see also Masters et al. 2010).”
A catalogue of 2D photometric decompositions in the SDSS-DR7 spectroscopic main galaxy sample: preferred models and systematics (2014, background): “The GZ2 project (Lintott et al. 2008, 2011) provides another morphological classification of nearly half of our sample.”
Rotation-invariant convolutional neural networks for galaxy morphology prediction (2015, background): “2 G A L A X Y Z O O Galaxy Zoo is an online crowdsourcing project where users are asked to describe the morphology of galaxies based on colour images (Lintott et al. 2008, 2011).”
The Milky Way Project First Data Release: a bubblier Galactic disc (2012, background): “The MWP user interface (see Figure 1) was built using Flash, based upon the pre-existing Moon Zoo interface (Joy et al. 2011).”
The green valley is a red herring: Galaxy Zoo reveals two evolutionary pathways towards quenching of star formation in early-and late-type galaxies (2014, methodology): “We use Galaxy Zoo 1 visual classifications of galaxy morphologies3 from the Galaxy Zoo citizen science project (Lintott et al. 2008, 2011).”
Game On, Science - How Video Game Technology May Help Biologists Tackle Visualization Challenges (2013, background): “Concluding Remarks: Developing New Visual Paradigms to Deal with Big Data Challenges and Citizen Science In the context of big data challenges, the development of citizen science – sometimes referred to as crowdsourcing - has been particularly welcomed and has proven its usefulness [39,42,43].”
The Coevolution of Galaxies and Supermassive Black Holes: Insights from Surveys of the Contemporary Universe (2014, background): “Recently, the power of citizen science has been exploited to create visual classifications of roughly 900,000 SDSS galaxies (Lintott et al. 2011).”